The UK division of Universal Pictures yesterday said that they would be making major release movies available for download via a new service being run by AOL. Films such as 'King Kong' and 'Pride And Prejudice' will be made available via the new venture, which will offer films fans the chance to buy a combined DVD/digital package. In one purchase consumers will get a DVD copy of a movie, plus two digital copies - one for viewing on a PC, the other on a portable digital media player. Digital rights management technology will be used to stop consumers making additional digital copies of the movie, or burning one of the digital copies to DVD.
With the recent growth of broadband internet, movie downloads have been in the pipeline for sometime, with the film industry keen to learn from the mistakes made by the record labels - in particular by ensuring official digital sources of major movies are in place before the sharing of films via P2P becomes too established. Some in the independent film sector have already made their films available in this way, but Universal's venture will be the first making major release Hollywood movies officially available online
Announcing the plans Universal Pictures UK chairman Eddie Cunningham told reporters: "I think what you're seeing here is the beginning of a revolution in terms of how we can distribute digitally and I would expect you'll see a lot more news of this type over the next few months".
The new service will offer films in a Microsoft format which means, of course, they won't be iPod compliant. Apple would allow you to play Microsoft media on their iPods, but doing so would obviously lead to a surge in piracy and possibly cause sea levels to rise, ice caps to melt and Apple dividend payments to slip slightly.
Anyway, back to the story. What effect the arrival of official movie download sites will have on the emerging music download sector remains to be seen. On one level it will help grow the customer base looking to buy entertainment online, but on another level it will mean new players competing for digital sales.