Microsoft has announced they have signed a movie deal with NBC Universal that will bring 30 catalog films to the Xbox Live Marketplace for European regions.
The titles are immediately available in the UK and Ireland and will be available in France, Germany and Spain soon.
“NBC Universal has a fantastic reputation in the film world and have some true blockbusters in their portfolio,” notes David Gosen, VP of marketing for Xbox Europe. “We are delighted to be working with them to bring major titles from Universal Pictures into Xbox Live living rooms - this is all part of our ongoing strategy to make Xbox a major entertainment hub.
“This agreement makes the Xbox Live film offering bigger and better than ever. For Xbox, we want to ensure that we have the best entertainment content available - Xbox Live has grown into one of Europe’s largest providers of on-demand high-definition movies and we’ll continue to grow the content offered through the service.
“Working with NBC Universal is further proof of our goal to be in business with the best in the entertainment industry.”
Result for: blockbusters
Motorola has announced today that it has inked a deal with Paramount to start a movie download service for its millions of mobile phone customers.
The service will launch in the UK at first and then move to Germany, Italy, Spain and France. The service is different than other mobile offerings however and will not allow on the go downloads. Users will instead have to download the movies to their PCs and then move them over to memory cards on their Motorola phones.
The company is hoping that customers will pay up to £8.99 per movie to watch on the small screen.
“We’re expecting significant consumer interest in the movie download store, with blockbusters available from just £5.99,” said Andrew Till, senior director of applications and service portfolio of the multimedia team at Motorola. “The first 40 films being made available mark a significant step change in our content strategy and we look forward to adding further rich material in the coming weeks and months.”
Prices will range from £5.99 for catalog movies to £8.99 for newer releases.
Result for: blockbusters
PC giant Dell has announced that it will begin pre-loading movies on some of its new PCs.
Beginning with the blockbuster hit Iron Man, Inspiron 1525 notebooks and XPS 420/630 can optionally have a digital copy already installed on the PC when you purchase it. The digital copy will also come with bonus special features.
The company says you cannot burn the copies to DVD but you can share them around a network using a Windows Media Extender such as the Xbox 360.
Dell says it will have titles from all studios but will focus only on blockbusters or classic movies rather than offer an entire catalog. The optional digital copy will be priced at $20 USD like its DVD counterpart but there was no word on whether that is standard pricing.
There was no technical details available about the digital copy but it will most likely have over 4000Kbs video bitrate and at least 192Kbs audio bitrate, just as most digital copies have now.
