I know it's hardly in keeping with what I write about here, but if you haven't seen this video, you simply have to. According to the email that was forwarded to me with the link, here is the story:

This tunnel in Russia is the longest in-city tunnel of Europe. There is a river running over it and water leaks at some points. When the temperature reaches -38 degrees like it did this winter, the road freezes and the result is the attached video taken during a single day with the tunnel camera.

Keep an eye out about thirty seconds in. After you've seen it, you might want to reconsider public transit...

Tags: Lefortovo tunnel

Seems that's what a bunch of the studios are saying. Their US$150m investment in Movielink, the jointly owned movie download site, hasn't gone anywhere and they are looking to get out. Business Week reports that they have been shopping it, to little avail, and that they have one year of cash left.

It all sounds a little like what happens when you get competitors trying to figure out how to work together and keep a Genie in a bottle, all at the same time. Goat rodeo. And who loses? The potential customer, and category adoption overall.

Now, I get that infighting and arrogance on the part of the studios may well be a big part of the problem here (as Carlo at Techdirt says), and their seeming inability to move beyond just allowing people to watch on their computer screens is a biggee. But - and maybe it's just me - given this brave new broadband planet we are living on, where convergence is just really starting to start and new forms of media are only now starting to pay their own way as money follows the audience, could it be that now might not be the best time to be getting out of the movie download business?

Maybe, say, fixing it might be an idea?

See also Tim Lee's blog.

Tags: movielink