James Delahunty
3 Aug 2005 10:29
The British Internet Broadcasting Company (BiBC) is launching a new service for video downloads which it hopes will mimic the success iTunes and music have. The service will allow customers to download videos of VHS quality. Currently it is only live comedy and live music videos. Due to the major studio's fear of piracy, there are no feature films on offer at this time. "Film producers have been a bit reticent," admitted BiBC's founder, Paul Hague.
"But this is about proving and showing there is a market. I am fairly confident once that they've seen this, they'll come on board," he told BBC News. The aim right now is to have some movies available for purchase by the end of the year, which will be just a trial period for the service. Analysts are not too impressed however with the service so far, mainly due to the lack of major content. "Content is absolutely key," said Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan. "It doesn't seem to have that much secured at the moment."
Another main reason for Hollywood not to jump into a movie download business like the music industry has, is that they don't want to undermine DVD sales of movies. Also when you assess damage done by piracy, the movie industry has been nowhere near as damaged as the music industry; so you could say the music industry jumped into the legal music downloading business because it had no other choice.
Rental systems currently exist for movie downloads but they only allow users to watch the content, they don't allow it to be stored. BiBC's Boxoffice365 would allow users to download copy protected files (of course) and keep them, watching whenever they want as many times as they want. Customers can also transfer the video to one portable video device. In the near future, there will be many more services like this. Even Sony has told details of its planned "iTunes for films" service which will originally launch offering 500 Sony movies.
Source:
BBC News