Warner embraces electronic delivery
Service in Europe offers movies in DVD window
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 1/30/2006
JAN. 30 | In a hint of the possible future of electronic delivery, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has formed a joint venture with German technology company Arvato Mobile to offer consumers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland permanent downloads of movies and TV programs simultaneously with their release on DVD.
The service, which is slated to launch in March, marks the first time a major U.S. studio has ventured into electronic sell-through during the DVD window.
Movie prices on the service, called In2Movies, will be comparable to DVD prices, according to Warner officials.
In another unusual twist for a major studio project, In2Movies will rely on a peer-to-peer distribution platform called GNAB that was developed by Arvato and is similar to the technology used by BitTorrent.
BitTorrent and similar “swarm” technologies break large files such as movies into thousands or millions of smaller pieces distributed over all the many computers connected to the network. When a user requests a file, pieces are drawn from multiple sources and assembled by the target computer, an approach to file-sharing that can greatly speed up download times by relieving bandwidth bottlenecks.
In the U.S., the studios have blamed BitTorrent for greatly increasing the amount of online piracy of movies and have brought several legal actions against the service.
The GNAB platform is designed to combine the efficiency of BitTorrent’s distributed-storage approach with a proprietary layer that provides safeguards against piracy.
“One of the most effective weapons for defeating online piracy is providing legal, easy to use alternatives,” Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara said in a statement. “Our initial efforts will focus on the German market, but in the months ahead, we will leverage this technology to better serve markets around the world.”
In an interview, Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders said the joint venture also hoped to attract other studios to the service.
“We think that would make it a more attractive consumer offer, which is what we want,” Sanders said. “We hope eventually to have multiple studios on the service, although we’re just starting to have those conversations.”
Initially, movies purchased from In2Movies would be viewable only on the computer used to download them. The service will store a permanent copy of the movie on the computer’s hard drive, protected by digital rights management software provided by Microsoft.
In future versions of the system, however, consumers will be able to transfer content to portable devices and burn it to DVDs.
Sanders said the timing for those enhancements is not yet determined.
Electronic sell-through has been the object of growing interest by studios in the U.S., but Sanders said no U.S. rollout of In2Movies is currently planned.
“We want to see how it develops in Germany first before we make any decisions about expanding it,” he said.
One tricky issue for the studio is the likely objections of DVD retailers, who see day-and-date downloads as a threat to their business.
Sanders said In2Movies had the ability to provide backend support for retailers who want to offer electronic sell-through from their own Web sites and would soon make a turnkey system available.
“We’re not looking to cut anyone out of the business,” Sanders said. “If a retailer wants to offer downloads from their Web site, this could be a very good solution for them.”
