Give the Devil His Queue

Yesterday the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) published UTBK's patent application (SN: 696159) for Systems and Methods to Prioritize a Queue. The proposed method prioritizes "a queue of waiting requests which are queued to be process sequentially. In one embodiment, a method includes: receiving one or more price bids on queuing priority; and determining an order of a plurality of pending requests based on at least the one or more price bids."

This method nicely coincides with one of my ideas for theatrical films on the telly. Nice timing.

What if you could watch Simpsons: The Movie at home on the day it's released? What would that be worth to you?

Think about it. Gracie Films and 20th Century-Fox Film Corp could still release a small number of showings through your cable (or satellite) provider and allow potential viewers to bid for the opportunity to watch at home. They could create a market for a scarce commodity and probably get more than $10/person. Maybe they can even throw in a couple interactive features and DVD-like extras that you can't get at the theater. Now it's a scarce commodity with value-add. I can see the $$$ already.

Of course, it won't happen next week. The studios are afraid the movie can be too easily recorded and distributed without permission. At some point though, digital watermarking will be sufficiently advanced that a pirated video will be traced to the home at which it was recorded.