AfterDawn: News

As expected, just few weeks after five major movie studios announced that they will launch their joint video-on-demand service later in this year, two studios left out from this co-operation announced that they've formed their own joint venture. Disney and News Corp announced that they will launch their VOD service under Movies.com in early 2002.

System will provide two ways to watch movies -- if consumer's cable company has VOD service already and if cable company offers Movies.com, users can access to movies via their existing cable box set. If user doesn't have VOD cable, he can use broadband Net connection to download the movie to his HDD and watch the movie with PC.



Analysts generally see these joint ventures steps to a right direction, but also have raised some concerns -- level of U.S. broadband connections at homes is still too low to support this kind of service. Other important aspect is that by offering VOD services, studios are alienating themselves from retail and rental giants like BlockBuster.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 5 Sep 2001 15:09