Movielink sold in Blockbuster deal
Blockbuster made a quantum leap into the video downloading business Wednesday by acquiring Movielink.
“Clearly, our customers have responded favorably to having other convenient ways to access movies and entertainment,” Blockbuster chieftain James Keyes told the New York Times.
Keyes told the AP that Blockbuster could make additional acquisitions in the download business.
Blockbuster plans to run the Movielink service as a standalone and to “eventually make elements of the service available through blockbuster.com,” it said in a statement.
Blockbuster straggled into the online movie-rental business last year, going up against rent-by-mail innovator Netflix. The Movielink buy is a bid to counter Netflix’s download service.
“We have taken an important step toward being able to make movie downloading conveniently available to computers, portable devices and ultimately to the television at home,” Keyes said in the one-size-fits-all press statement.
Blockbuster also is an investor in MovieLink’s better-stocked competitor CinemaNow. The MovieLink deal comes with rights to films from the download site’s creators, the Hollywood studios Warner Bros., MGM and Paramount.
Also Wednesday, the News Corp.-NBC Universal online video venture picked up a cool $100 million from the media investors Providence Equity Partners. The so-far non-existent web site will be a home for video from Fox, NBC and the other broadcasters owned by the media companies. It also plans to host user content.
Making a living (or not) with online video
The explosive growth of online video in the past two years has everyone with a camcorder or a TV network wondering about the potential for meaningful compensation. So far, no one’s getting rich but the video clip hosts.
Wondering if TV will work on the Web, The Wall Street Journal today posted an email conversation between Steven Starr, co-founder of Revver, and Sab Kanaujia, NBC Universal’s vice president for digital product strategy. Here a sample:
Kanaujia: Can independent creators make a living with Web video? I don’t think they can in the short term. Current business models online are not attractive enough to make a living or leave your other day job.
Starr: Old school independent creators, used to Hollywood economics, should stay home. But successful independent online creators are seeing CPM and [cost-per-click] returns that can exceed $10,000 per month. … The promise of an online creator economy is right around the corner, one that supports an entirely new form of creativity quite distinct and separate from traditional TV creation.
Kanaujia: In the short-term, I think the Web will continue to provide a great vehicle for independent creators to get discovered (zero barriers to entry). And when they do get discovered, many may want to join traditional media — or not. (For example), Rocketboom — Amanda Congdon established herself online. She leveraged her online popularity to get an offer from ABC. … Now, she’s using that opportunity to marry the digital and traditional worlds by anchoring in addition to doing video blogs on ABC.com.
Starr: Using the Web as a discovery platform for old media trolling for talent is 1999 all over again; why take these new media creators and force them into old media formats?
Good stuff. Check out the full exchange on the future of Web video on the WSJ site.
BTW, reports are surfacing that the Journal’s Web content may be going all-free with the takeover by Rupert Murdoch. The New York Times is opening up its columns again after a clumsy try at multitiered content for subscribers and non-subscribers. Good news since the Times just raised its price and cut an inch and a half off the paper size. Yuck.
What’s on the Internet tonight?
Last 100‘s Daniel Langendorf asks himself: “Is the Internet the fifth major TV network?”
I figure we’ve had a powerful fifth network for years: HBO, home of “The Sopranos”
But if we’re ruling out pay cable and The CW (yes, let’s), this is a perfectly legitimate academic just-for-grins rhetorical question.
Here Daniel gets good and worked up over some pop content that’s caught fire.
I’m excited to “tune in” to an Internet “channel” like MySpace or YouTube to catch the season finales of shows like “LonelyGirl15″ and “Prom Queen,” just like I was anxious to see what happened in the network finales of “Lost” and “Heroes.” I’ve even caught myself during the day wondering, “What’s on the Internet tonight?”
All things TV eventually will be distributed via the Internet or its successor anyway, but there you have a fun concept to debate over a couple of Red Bulls. What did we talk about before the Internet, anyway?
Vongo – 14 Day Free Trial. Start downloading movies right now. Get your free 14-day Vongo trial.
http://my.vongo.com/cj
TiVo’s new HD unit eases sticker shock
TiVo released its first HD recorder last fall. The time-shifting lords were glacially slow to market compared with DirecTV and cable companies. That unit was pricey ($799) — and that’s before you got to TiVo’s subscription fees.
Things just got better. At the end of the month, TiVo sends to market the HD machine’s more economical little brother: The 180-hour TiVo HD DVR
You now can buy the older box for $566 off
One of the cool things you can do with this box is download movies directly from Amazon’s Unbox. Connect to the Net via wiFi.
The unit replaces the cable box and will even capture local HD signals with rabbit ears. You’ll need to rent a CableCard if you have cable. That runs about $1.50 a month. The cable box fee goes away when you return it. The feds just required the cablers to provide this after the usual kicking and screaming from those jokers. They stand to lose PPV/VOD revenue from the migration.
Here’s what the New York Times’ tech guy, David Pogue, has to say about the new HD TiVo:
… (E)ven the new $300 model smokes the circuits off the generic, cruddy-software rivals from the cable companies. The TiVo looks better, works better, and offers about 12,000 useful features that the cable-company boxes lack.
The cards are supposed to work in DVRs, TVs and computers, including media centers. But many of those devices have not yet provided slots for the cards. My up-to-date Sharp Aquino TV doesn’t. Some LG models do. The FCC ruling should speed that along. Still, most of us pilgrims will continue to wait here, impatiently, for the holy grail of convergence.
More good news from TiVo and its sort-of partner DirecTV. The Series2-based DVRs that DirecTV provided its customers are all getting some upgrades. The most significant is addition of Web scheduling, says Ars Technica, which has been all over the TiVo-DirecTV story.