In a novel effort to gear up film-viewing for the mobile era and fight piracy, the Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has paired with arvato, a Bertelsmann arm to set up a company that will make movies officially downloadable. Dubbed as In2Movies, the initiative will initially make available movies and TV programs via a P2P network in countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where German is spoken.
The new service that is expected to debut this March, hopes to ensure the availability of movies for P2P download, on the very day the German DVD release appears. This comes shortly after Hollywood studios and the Motion Picture Association of America have stepped up efforts to prevent illegal Internet movie sharing using BitTorrent and eDonkey technologies. Pinning the blame on P2P networks for online piracy and huge loss of revenues, there have been a spate of lawsuits to set the scores right.
The new service is expected to have a repertoire of over 80 films from the Warner Bros' stable including new releases, local productions and library titles. This would include big box office hits like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Batman Begins alongside popular TV shows like Friends or The O.C. Apart from this, In2Movies hopes to include programming sourced through third-party content providers and local distributors.
Though the P2P downloads will be preliminarily available on computers, the longterm plan is to make downloadable entertainment available on DVD recorders besides portable devices like the mobile phone. Customers will need to visit the In2Movies web site to download entertainment either directly or from partner sites. In the long run, In2Movies foresees that DVD retailers will play a key role in the movie download business.
Kevin Tsujihara, President of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group said, "Through this partnership with arvato mobile, Warner Bros. will be breaking new ground in legal digital delivery, providing a rich experience at affordable prices”. He opined that key to defeating online piracy was to provide “legal, easy to use alternatives”, which Warner Bros. as an industry leader could do. In the process using the innovative platform the company would benefit by expanded “reach of its digital content”. While confirming that the initial focus was on the German market, he assured that in the forthcoming months the company would try to “serve markets around the world".
The technology that is going to be at the heart of the In2Movies service is from GNAB that makes the best of copyright protected centralized download and distribution through a decentralized network. Thereby the company could effectively achieve distribution without slowing down either the download or needing very huge capacity servers. As arvato chief executive Bernhard Ribbrock noted this would become a “new channel” of “authorized entertainment".
