News Corp. said today that will begin selling its Twentieth Century Fox films and television shows across its Internet properties, according to the
Financial Times. The service launches on News
Corp.'s IGN--a media portal for young men--in October, and will extend to MySpace and others later. It charges $20 for new movies like "X-Men: The Last Stand," and $1.99 for TV series like "24." It
will use Direct2Drive.com's download service, which enables users to transfer content to Windows Media-compatible portable devices--an alternative to Apple's products iPod, and iTunes. In recent
months, Hollywood's largest studios have rushed to offer consumers the ability to download and own films via the Internet on the same day they are released for sale on DVD, in an attempt to prevent
illegal downloading. But they are not allowed to download the content they buy to DVDs--believed to be one reason why sites like Movielink, Cinemanow and Guba.com have failed to take off. While
independent groups are looking into changing this, thus far the market has shown limited consumer demand for downloading and watching movies on laptops and personal computers. It seems they would much
rather burn content to DVDs in order to watch it on their expensive home entertainment systems.
Read the whole story at Financial Times »
