Winning over the file sharers

For the last year, a handful of companies has offered American university students cut-rate music subscriptions on campus, looking to wean them from the free file-swapping networks.

Cdigix, the lone company wholly focused on this business, is now expanding into video services, hoping that movie studios see the same benefits as record labels in extending an olive branch to file-swapping students.

So far it has been a tough sell. Record labels are giving Cdigix and others wholesale discounts, and that means legal digital music can be extraordinarily inexpensive — and sometimes even free — on campuses. For their part, the Hollywood studios aren't yet proffering the same deals, and that means that downloading a movie online is no cheaper than going to the local Blockbuster.

But Cdigix founder and President Brett Goldberg believes that movie studios are starting to change their tune. He's already cut a few deals with studios and now offers movies from Walt Disney and Turner Broadcasting. Over the next year, he thinks other studios will see the advantages of extending attractive terms to students, and so be willing to offer him better terms.

That wouldn't necessarily guarantee the equivalent of hitting a home run. Some students are quick to adopt subsidised services on campus, but others have protested the use of their fees for online music. Nor is there any guarantee that when they leave campus, they won't be recaptured by the allure of file trading.

For now, however, Cdigix, which has a presence on 21 campuses, may be the closest thing to a bridge between campuses and Hollywood's version of acceptable movie watching. ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com talked to Goldberg about what he's seeing on college campuses today.

Q: You've been doing music services on campus for a while now. What are you learning?
A: There are a couple of things that are indicative of the trend we're seeing. We offer two components to our services, subscription and per download offerings.

That's pay per download?
That's right. So far, the results seem to indicate that the subscription downloads, the tethered download service, is being used with much more frequency than the permanent downloads. Second, when a university is able to subsidise the service, the usage rates are certainly better.

That's particularly true where the student government [the US equivalent of the students' union] was the one to subsidise it. That seems to have the potential to work the best, because... the student leaders out there on campus marketing the service for you.