Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Hollywood studios to deliver on-line; first DVD+RW drive

20 Aug 2001, 12:00 am

Five major Hollywood studios have announced a joint venture to deliver movies on demand to consumers over the internet, due to roll-out next year. A movie download, which will delete itself after 30 days, will likely cost in the region of $3.99 (£2.76). The service will compete with pirated movie downloads currently available a few days after films open in US cinemas.

The studios behind the venture are Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, each owning a 20% stake. Walt Disney and 20th Century Fox are not yet involved in the venture and, according to the Wall Street Journal, are developing their own service.

WSJ also reports that the five co-operating studios have briefed the Department of Justice but hope to avoid monopoly concerns by licensing their films to distributors other than the joint venture company, the name of which has yet to be announced, although it has provisionally been called “Moviefly”.

The movies will be downloaded as encrypted, compressed files to those with broadband internet access. Currently, around 10 million US homes have broadband connections, according to the movie studios.

Hewlett-Packard has announced the launch of the first commercial DVD+RW drive for PCs, to be available in US shops from September at a retail price of $599. It will allow consumers to record video to disc, erase and re-record. The drives will be incorporated in HP’s PCs later this year in an effort to push up sales.

DVD+RW is one of three competing DVD recording standards, the others being DVD-RW and DVD-RAM.

DVD+RW is supported by Dell, Sony, Philips, Mitsubishi and others. The blank discs will retail at $15.99, less than the media costs for the rival formats.

DVD-RW is a similar format intended for movies while the DVD+RW format is for both movies and data. DVD-RW is supported by Compaq and Apple.

DVD-RAM suffers from incompatibility with most consumer DVD players and is said to be best for data storage, not movies.

The expectation is that one of the three formats will win as the new VHS while two of the formats will suffer the fate of Betamax.