Petteri Pyyny
9 Sep 2002 15:05
Online distribution venture of major movie studios, MovieLink, made it to the news first time for a long, long time. It announced today that IBM will provide the technology for the service which is due to open by end of this year.
Under the agreement, which is signed for next three years, IBM will provide storage and server facilities to the service. MovieLink, which was previously named as MovieFly is a joint venture of MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Service will incorporate some form of DRM system into it, but the provider/s of this technology are yet to be announced.
MovieLink will offer full-length movies through Internet connection, through downloading instead of streaming. This basically means that the service is pretty much limited to broadband users who have decent connection speeds on their systems (international standardized limit for term 'broadband' is 500k, so most of the old-fashioned 256k DSL services are not even broadband services). Also, the encoding mechanism is still a mystery, although there are really two possible options -- MPEG-4 and Microsoft's WMV.