Hannover House, the video and film distributor has announced today a new deal with Google that will launch a video rental and VOD channel for Hannover on YouTube.
Starting this week, the channel will have 100 films from Hannover House, Elite Entertainment, FOCUSFilms, and Plaza Entertainment.
“YouTube and Google are uniquely positioned to reinvent the entire video-on-demand consumer model,” says Eric Parkinson, C.E.O. “Their reach is unsurpassed, and their consumer pricing model is extremely competitive, in many cases beating traditional video rental costs. With more and more consumers moving toward video-on-demand as a convenient way to view movies, the Hannover House movie channel venture with YouTube will prove invaluable to our company.”
“We believe that video-on-demand will continue to grow over the next few years into a major revenue source for the company. The technology has reached the point where films can be quickly and safely streamed directly to consumers, and this creates an immediacy not previously available. Additionally, video-on-demand eliminates the inventory, freight and storage costs associated with hard goods items such as DVDs and Blu-ray units.”
Result for: film distributor
A French man who illegally downloaded 12,591 music tracks, 426 movies and 16 complete TV series has been sentenced to a 2 months suspended jail sentence and been forced to pay a 33,000 euro fine this week.
The collection was first discovered in 2006 when authorities were searching the man’s house on an unrelated fraud case warrant. The man is a retired IT expert and used the defense during his trial that the collection was for private use, not commercial. He also added, says TF that he “believed he had been acting within the law.”
The court did not agree.
The plaintiffs, which included the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP were asking for 2 euros for each unauthorized MP3, and 7.50-12.50 euros for each movie. It was unclear what was paid for each TV episode.
Result for: film distributor
Blue Underground, a giant distributor of cult and horror movies on DVD has announced that they will begin releasing their titles on Blu-ray later this year.
There was no word on which titles would retail first or even what quarter the movies would be released in but Blue Underground has already put word on their website that they plan to support the format with a large number of Blu-ray releases.
First started in the early 90s, Blue Underground has a large catalog of cult and horror classics, including some of the more popular titles from legends of film making like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Larry Cohen, and George A. Romero.
