Movies, TV For Download Through Fox


Fox Interactive Media (FIM) and Twentieth Century Fox today inked a
multi-year deal to offer consumers movies and television shows to download from sites on MySpace.com and other sites on the FIM network.


Financial terms were not made public about the deal, which is the latest play for
media companies and film studios to make money from the Internet.


Customers who purchase movies and television shows will be able to transfer
the content to handheld devices compatible with Windows Media.


Such portability signifies the removal of a major stumbling block in the
industry regarding providing content over the Web; content providers had
been loathe to allow consumers to transfer content from PCs to other players
for fear that their material would be pirated.


Yet consumers don’t want to be stuck watching movies or TV shows on their
computers — they want to be able to take them on the go.


Digital rights management (DRM) software has made portability without the
threat of piracy a reality.


In this Fox deal, IGN Entertainment will be the first FIM property to offer
new releases, made-for-TV movies and direct-to-video releases from Twentieth
Century Fox on its Direct2Drive site in October 2006.


Direct2Drive employs a secure digital download service to allow users to
transfer content to up to two PCs and one portable device per PC.


The FIM network, accessed by more than 75 million people a month in the
U.S., will charge consumers $19.99 for new feature film releases, such as
“X-Men The Last Stand,” and $1.99 per TV series episode, which could include
Fox’s popular “24.”


The site will also offer current television series from Twentieth Century
Fox, Fox Broadcasting Company, Fuel TV, Speed and FX, within 24 hours of
initial broadcast.


Additional FIM properties, such as MySpace.com, will offer content later.


Content providers have been working on trying to push content to consumers
over the Web for the last five or six years. The technology to do it has
been there, but the safeguards haven’t been in place until recently.


With the security of media-delivery software improving and consumers
broadening the bandwidth pipe into their homes, networks like Fox and movie
studios are hoping to capitalize on this multi-million-dollar e-commerce
prospect.


“Today marks an important step as we continue to build a bridge between the
worlds of user-generated and top-quality, professional content, further
enhancing our range of consumer offerings across both free, ad-supported and
paid download business models,” said FIM President Ross Levinsohn.


Fox’s new portable download play is a first for a network, but hardly new
for online businesses.


Apple’s iTunes Music Store sells many television shows from Fox
for $1.99 apiece. Those can only be played Apple’s iPod devices or through
its iTunes software on a computer.


Last month, Internet movie service provider Movielink said it
had licensed software from Sonic Solutions to offer consumers a legal way to
pay for movies they download from the Internet and burn them onto blank
DVDs.


Two days later, Movielink rival CinemaNow became
the first company to allow movies piped over the Internet to be securely
burned onto a DVD.

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