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04.19.10 Examining Seagate's Plan To Preload Hard Drives With Movies  By John Vinson If you're someone who has a ton of media on their computer, you undoubtedly have a second drive where you keep excess content. While this concept is par for course with the tech community, many casual computer users probably don't even think of having a second drive. Much less a portable one. With Seagate's latestdecision to partner with Paramount Pictures to preload movies onto FreeAgent Go's, I think they're trying to appeal to that casual market. The first deal in Seagate's plan is purchasers of the 500GB FreeAgent Go will receive a free pre-loaded copy of Star Trek (2009). Along with Star Trek, the drives will ship with 20 additional movies which can be unlocked to watch. The titles will cost anywhere between $9.99 - $14.99. Once the titles have been unlocked they can be played on Windows Media Player, or if you want to drop the money on the FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player. There's no word on whether or not the files would be playable through any other program. Obviously, this decision will leave many people divided as to whether or not Seagate is the direction to go for their portable hard drive needs. There will be those who are attracted to this decision, and will appreciate the ease of simply unlocking a movie to play. Then others will see this as simply a marketing ploy, and more crap they'll have to delete from a purchased product. If you crunch the numbers, there will more than likely be 30+ GB of storage taken up by these pre-loaded movies. That's 4% of your portable hard drive already being used before opening the product. While that does not seem like much to some, there are those who could fill a 500GB hard drive in one transfer. For some people, it's the principle of the situation that will keep them away from this deal. I'm guessing it won't be difficult to simply remove these movies from the hard drive. However, it represents the idea of users having to deal with unneeded content on their computing devices. Windows customers know of what I speak. You can't buy a retail PC without receiving at least 3-4 pieces of 'ware' on the hard drive. Maybe even more. I think this was a smart move by Seagate. By exposing the idea of watching movies from a portable hard drive, they're looking to expand their client base. For those who wouldn't think of needing a portable hard drive, they now see that it is an option to store their movies. Changing the perception of consumers is a hard thing to do, but this deal is a good start. About the Author: John is a staff writer for WebProNews. |
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