Cool Tech Reviews

Suzanne Ault at Video Business reports that Warner Home Video is planning some aggressive price cutting on Blu-ray Discs during the fourth quarter:

Starting early September and rolling through first-quarter 2009, Warner will offer a Blu-ray point-of-sale rebate program with which retailers will essentially be able to order participating catalog titles for around $11.

Even with a retail mark-up on the featured titles—including The Fugitive, Enter the Dragon, Clockwork Orange, The Shining, The Aviator, Road Warrior and Swordfish—the price tag to consumers should be significantly less than the titles’ current average of $20 to $25 retail price at outlets such as Amazon.com and Best Buy.
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Additionally, Warner will offer rebates, although less extensive, for newer Blu-ray releases, including 300, The Departed, I Am Legend, Ocean’s 13 and We Are Marshall. This layer of the Blu-ray program also will run from early September to the first quarter, according to store sources.

The consumer price for these titles is likely to fall somewhere between $17 and $20. That would still represent a deal for shoppers, as titles such as 300 are now falling between $24 and $30 at outlets such as Amazon and Best Buy.

After Blu-ray won the high def DVD war, it has been plagued by the perception that both the players and the titles are priced exorbitantly. This ought to help a little although click through to see the complaints from retailers who think it might be a bad idea because "format is becoming devalued too quickly."

Greg Sandoval at ZDNet:

Warner Bros. Entertainment on Monday began selling full-length feature films and TV shows over the Internet via Guba, one of a legion of companies presenting amateur-videos on the Web.

Guba customers can rent a film for $1.79 per day or pay $9.99 to own an older title. Newer movies cost $19.99 (actually TV shows rent for $1.79 and movies for $1.99 a day - ed.). All the content is protected by Microsoft-developed digital rights management software, the companies said.

The agreement is the latest sign that at least some in Hollywood may be ready to deal with Internet sites that some in the movie business consider a threat. Warner Bros. last month announced that it had chosen file-sharing technology from BitTorrent to distribute films.

The difference is that the Guba content can be copied to DVDs:

Under the Guba-Warner Bros. agreement, people will be able to make a copy of a video onto a DVD, but, because of industry licensing agreements, it can only be played on the computer from which it was burned. Wuthrich said he hopes consumers will be able to watch the copied DVDs with a DVD player within a year or so.

while purchases from BitTorrent cannot be copied to DVDs at all.

For Guba, the partnership is a coup. Like most other competitors in the video-sharing space, Guba has seen its public profile eclipsed by the juggernaut, YouTube. Thomas McInerney, the Guba’s CEO, said he hopes the Warner Bros. partnership will help the company stand apart from rivals.

There is some interesting background on Guba by following the link, but the bigger story is studios embracing download services in the apparent hope that the widespread availability of legal content will cut down on piracy. It might even work.

Note that Warner Bros. did a separate deal with corporate cousin AOL for distributing old TV shows for free.

Update 8/23: This post was heavily revised.

Press release:

Thousands of episodes from some of the most popular television series of all time will make a comeback exclusively on AOL.com (http://www.aol.com) in early 2006, thanks to a pioneering collaboration between AOL and Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution to form a new broadband network. The network– called In2TV – will allow consumers to stream full-length episodes from favorite series such as Welcome Back Kotter, Sisters, Beetlejuice, Lois & Clark, La Femme Nikita and Growing Pains free and on-demand on the Web. Along with full-length episodes, In2TV will also include unique interactive features such as games, quizzes, polls, trivia contests and more.

This first-of-its-kind interactive video experience demonstrates the impact of broadband—now in 53% of U.S. households*–on the television industry, as broadband provides a new platform for television assets on the Internet.

So what took them so long? This is one of the synergies that were promised as a rationale for the original AOL merger with Time Warner.

And how are they going to make money off it? In2TV will be supported by advertising much like regular broadcast TV:

In2TV will provide AOL’s advertisers with compelling video inventory for instream broadband advertising as well as opportunities for sponsorships and accompanying banner ads. Video ads, 15-second and 30-second spots, will be limited to a total of 1-2 minutes within each 30-minute episode as compared to 8 minutes of advertising on broadcast television.

There are more programming details available by following the link, but from a technology perspective there’s something else:

These series will be offered in a new DVD quality video format called “AOL Hi-Q.” This new technology, which builds upon AOL’s industry-leading online video experience, enables high resolution, full-screen viewing. It will be made available free to any broadband user (along with standard-quality streaming). AOL.com is the first major portal to offer this kind of high quality video experience to consumers.

And in fact, there’s a separate press release devoted to it:

The AOL.com portal is the first to introduce a trial for a new “AOL Hi-Q” high quality video format. The AOL Hi-Q format builds on the AOL.com Web portal’s industry-leading video experience ( http://www.aol.com/video) and can deliver DVD quality videos, in addition to standard quality streaming video, free to broadband users. Consumers can view AOL Hi-Q video on demand as well as select to have new Hi-Q videos in a particular category of interest, such as online movie trailers, music videos, video game trailers and more entertainment content, pushed to them when they are available.
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Using one of the industry’s first commercial-grade, peer-to-peer grid distribution networks, developed in partnership with Kontiki, AOL® Hi-Q™ can deliver DVD quality videos directly to consumers more quickly and efficiently. The peer-to-peer distribution network built by Kontiki features robust security to protect copyrighted content through digital rights management (DRM) and a centrally managed, highly-scalable delivery model that enables AOL to reliably deliver content to consumers. Through the installation of a simple plug-in, a special AOL Hi-Q video player provides a high resolution display with image quality designed for full-screen viewing on PC monitors or televisions capable of showing a PC interface.

So you’re actually signing up for a peer-to-peer (P2P) network developed by Kontiki and sponsored and managed by AOL. Interesting times indeed!