AOL announced today that it has finalized deals to offer download to own deals with 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group through Video.AOL.com. AOL will now distribute content from all 6 the corporations owning major studios in the US, either through download to own or online.
Downloads will cost between $10 and $20 dollars each and with no option to rent. Downloaded videos will be viewable on multiple computers and portable devices, presumably via Windows Media Player. Next up in coming months will be episodes of television shows from Fox Entertainment Group and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. The AOL Video site currently offers free short video clips and user generated video.
It’s hard for me to get excited about this in terms of creativity, there’s not much new here - but at a time when AOL is giving so much away, it’s an interesting play to make themselves the dominant download-to-own portal on the web. Competitors MovieLink and Cinemanow both offer rentals as well as purchase, Guba wins on price to own and Sony’s newly acquired Grouper P2P technology may win on speed of download. Amazon has a forthcoming desktop video on demand client as well. But for now at least, if you’re looking to own and it’s selection from major studios you seek, then AOL may be the place to go when these partnerships come online. I’m still waiting for someone to partner with the studios and do something truly innovative, we’ll see how long that wait lasts.
$10-$20 per download? gimme a break
Seriously for $10-20 I might as well buy the damn thing at the store, who wouldn’t rather own it?
And I’d be shocked if DVD extras were included.
It’s hard to determine whether movie studios are still shockingly clueless, embarrassingly greedy, or both.
I’m going to vote for option C.
With that said, I’m actually eager to give guba a try. 99 cents for a rental? That seems pretty darn reasonable to me, and I even found at least three non-ancient movies worth seeing on their site
Two fatal attributes: Windows only & no rentals.
HEY AOL,
IS THIS THE WAY YOU ARE THANKING YOU LOYAL CUSTOMERS.
YOU SHOULD AT LEAST OFFER IT FOR FREE AT FIRST.
ACCORDING TO AD REVENUES, YOU WILL MAKE YOUR MONEY
YOU GUYS ARE DROOLING FOR. PLEASE DON’T INSULT OUR INTELLIGENCE. WE CAN GET RENTALS FOR MUCH CHEAPER.
~CONCERNED CUSTOMER
seriously, $10-20 is laughable. I can understand the studios not getting this, but AOL should know better at least somewhat. I know they’re AOL, but come on…$20 for a movie?
I really wish movielink and cinemanow could get more love. I’ve been using them for at least 2 years. For only $4 a pop, and often less, I can choose from a decent selection of new releases and classics that I somehow missed. They really need to do something BIG to stay relevant.
Can I be a media company executive? Or am I automatically disqualified because I’m not a stupid incompetent jackass?
aol has always took advantage of the less savy INTERNET USER problem is with Myspace you tube and the openess of the internet there are alot less unknowning internet users
Did they mention the resolution, frame rate, etc?
Why are you all so negative? If you said Youtube was to do this, you’d be all over it…. if AOL, it’s gotta be bad. Come on!
No. If God were to do this and charge $10-$20 for downloadable movies, I’d still (blasphemously) make fun of it.
My bandwidth, my time, no extras, no burnability to standard DVDs. I’d pay $3-5 for such movies. Maybe. If I could burn ‘em to a DVD and watch it in my living room or at a friend’s house, $5-$10.
How long until I can seamlessly order tv shows and movies from my windows media centre setup instead of clumsily getting them from torrent sites??
I run WMC hooked up to a plasma display and use it for everything (tv, digital photos, movies, etc…). Much like music on an ipod I PREFER to have them in digital format than on silly silver discs because they are much more manageable. The same way people pay around the same if not more to download albums from itunes, there is also a market for movies and tv shows to be delivered this way.
ANy specs on the downloadable videos .. and is it a quick download?