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.
