More of my sites

WinInfo Daily News
SuperSite for Windows
Windows IT Pro Magazine
Connected Home
Thurrott Dot Com
Windows Weekly at TWIT

About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Provider of TV Movie Channels Looks to Expand to PC's and Video Players

New York Times (registration required):

Starz Entertainment Group is introducing a $9.99-a-month subscription service that will allow people to download movies from the Internet and watch them on their computers, portable video players and television sets.

The new offering, called Vongo, comes at a time when movie studios and television networks are rapidly expanding their efforts to distribute their content over the Internet, experimenting with both paid and advertiser-supported models.

With Vongo, Starz will shift to technology from Microsoft that will allow movies to be downloaded and watched on portable video players using Microsoft's software.

Starz, which is offering a test version of the service at Vongo.com, has so far not been able to work out an arrangement for Vongo to run on iPods.

As a subscription service, Vongo will allow users to download as many movies as they want for $9.99 a month. They will be able to choose from an ever-changing roster of about 800 movies, including about 300 films in rotation on the Starz cable channel (mainly movies released in theaters one to three years earlier) and 500 older titles.

Looks good, though of course the lack of iPod compatibility will be problematic. I can't get the beta to run on my PC, apparently because of a conflict with Office 12 Beta 1, but I'm interested to see how this compares to CinemaNow and MovieLink.

[ Posted at 2:30 PM | Permalink ]