Europe's largest Internet provider T-Online said it has secured deals for top Hollywood and German films that will allow it to show movies over the Internet. The deals give T-Online, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, access to the library and to new movies by Hollywood’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and to German blockbusters from Constantin Film. "This landmark agreement speaks to the promising future of video-on-demand worldwide,'' Jim Griffiths, President of MGM Worldwide Television Distribution, said in a statement. T-Online's rival Tiscali has been offering weekly movie Webcasts for the past year. But T-Online's broadband project T-Online Vision on TV, to be launched by the end of the year, differs in that it connects a regular TV set through a set-top box to the Internet so that the movies can be watched on a regular screen. To reduce the time to load the movies over the Internet, T-Online plans to pre-load 10-15 popular films on the set-top box, to be made by Fujitsu Siemens.
T-Online, which has done deals with Vivendi's Universal and Spielberg's Dreamworks as well, plans to have 400 to 500 movies on offer when the service starts, and around 1,000 eventually, he said.
New movies will become available at around the time when they are released on DVD, he said. T-Online will charge subscribers three to four euros for a 24-hour period in which the movie can be watched an unlimited number of times, Frommhold said.
The set-top boxes needed for the service are expected to hit shops by mid-November at E1,000 -E1,500 apiece. Fujitsu Siemens has said it expects to sell about 30,000 in the first three to four months after the launch. | 
14-10-2003
Similar Threads 
Linear Mode
