A month or so back, I was having drinks with one of the founders of Napster, discussing the future of the movie business.

In the parallel world of music, things look fairly gloomy – CD sales are down, digital revenues don’t make up the gap, and piracy runs as rampant as ever. Yet thus far in the movie world, the problems have been far less severe.

Most analysts, like my Napster friend, credit the difference to technology – from bandwidth issues (stealing a movie takes way longer than a song or album) through to how media is actually consumed (computers and iPods have quickly become where most people choose to consume music anyway, whereas the average viewer would still prefer to see a film on their television, and doesn’t have an easy way to get the digital download across those last twenty feet).

I, on the other hand, contended that movies’ relative success stems from a deeper cause: people think movies are worth the money, and think albums are hugely overpriced.

Yesterday, I ran across a recent study that backs my claim. Consumers, asked about perceived value for their money, placed movies in the next to highest position – second only to chicken. Albums, on the other hand, essentially fell off the bottom of the list.

In the world of music, some percentage of people already pay for downloads (hence iTunes’ success), and others never will. The dividing line, I suspect, is whether each believes a $9.99 price is too high for an album.

In the world of film, then, where a vastly higher percentage fall on the ‘worth the money’ side of that line, I’m increasingly convinced digital download revenue models can make sense.

Sure, the same technology problems that hold back film piracy equally hold back legitimate sales. And figuring out what those digital download revenue models actually look like is probably three or so years of ugly trial and error away. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

At which point, all we’ll need to do is to find a way to download chicken.