I'm watching a fun little TV documentary about easyCinema.com. Stelios Haji-Iaonnou is trying to do to movie distribution what he has already done to the airline business. He wants to do no frills cinema. He did good business for the first few nights, but then it flagged. Basically, Stelios hasn't had a mega hit since easyJet, despite several tries, in such things as cars and internet shops.

I mostly watch DVDs now, which I rent at a slowly decreasing price from various local shops, including Blockbuster Video. From Monday to Thursday, I can rent three non-current movies for a week, for £5 the lot of them. Not that there's much worth renting, but much the same applies in the cinema from where I sit, and nowadays I never see anything I can't wait a few months for.

But, to speak up for Stelios, in the days when I used to go to the cinema a lot it always used to puzzle me that they didn't go in more for differential pricing. One week you'd be sitting in a near deserted cinema. The next week you'd be queueing all round Leicester Square. Why didn't they knock the price down for the slow sellers, and shift the product? No computers to do the sums? Certainly Stelios would be nowhere without computers, not just for him to do his sums, but for all of us to buy his tickets.

Here's the What's on page and here's the Locations page. So far, it's only Milton Keynes.

I suspect that the real problem for no frills cinema is the rise and rise of home cinema, which has all the frills you can imagine, including such excellent extras as a pause button. I suspect Stelios may have arrived in the movie business a decade too late.