Last week, Quickflix announced the first Netflix-like service for Australia, letting you watch as many movies as you like for a flat monthly fee. Unsurprisingly, its major competitor Telstra also wants a slice of that business, and says it will have a similar offering in early 2012.
Telstra has long offered movies for rental via its BigPond Movies service, but only on a pay-per-title basis. At the company’s Christmas media briefing today, IPTV director Ben Kinealy said that it was likely Telstra would introduce a similar arrangement in early 2012:
We’re working on a range of expansions to the business model. Right now we have a great pay-per-view service, but we’ll be expanding the category dramatically and we’ll be expanding the business model. We are going to be looking at bringing those types of things and some other business models to BigPond Movies. We are working on a proposition with the studios as we speak. We believe we can have a substantially better offer than our competition, and we continue to look at other opportunities in the market.
The obvious advantage Telstra has in this space is that it can ensure movie downloads aren’t counted against download caps, and can bundle the offer with other services. The disadvantage is that it might choose to tie that deal to long-term contracts particular hardware such as the T-Box. The T-Box is certainly Telstra’s focus for the rest of the year, with a promotional offer of $200 worth of movie credits (to be spent over six months) for customers who sign up for a $109 per month bundle including home phone and broadband services.
The Foxtel via T-Box service is also being rolled out to ADSL customers across all capital cities (it’s already on offer in Sydney and Melbourne). According to Kinealy, 214,000 of the devices have been sold so far.
Republished from Lifehacker
light487
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 3:43 PMHaha.. Oh the irony..
First they sell off their DVD Rental business to Quickflix and then Quickflix beats them to the punch with streaming movie services and now they come out with their own subscription service.. but way too late to catch up.
Of course Telstra will end up being the most popular choice.. they have the market dominance in BigPond.. despite it being outrageously expensive, they still seem to get the most customers.. a little like Apple really.
Daniel K
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 4:33 PMtake a look at our plans mate, you will find them to be not to bad these days, and you do get the best service :) (well from a technical point of view)
adam
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 4:43 PMAnd like Apple people use them because although they are more expensive it gets a better job done than the rest.
olearymo
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 5:03 PM+1
klaw81
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 7:44 AMWe’re in Bigpoind because they’re cheaper than the alternatives, given that our choices for ADSL2+ are rather limited in our area.
Bigpond’s customer service and reliabilitiy has been nothing to write home about and I will happily jump ship when our contract expires. It seems the NBN will arrive just in time to do so
I might be tempted to stay if this Bigpond Movies deal turns out to be too good to miss. I’m betting it won’t be though – no doubt it will be hardware-locked to T-Box which I have no interest in – surely they could make it available via browser so any hardware could access it.
Sicarius123
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 3:46 PMI love living in the nations capital and having the choice of 3mb ADSL that can’t stream HD, or 8mb cable through local ISP’s who can’t handle the bandwidth.
Dan Miller
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 4:26 PMI use Big Pond Movies on my LG TV and it’s good. But it could be a whole lot better. There needs to be more HD versions of the movies on offer. All so they need to make the HD picture quality better. I mean it looks good but Apple TV do it better with HD streaming.
stevjosco
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 4:55 PMI’ve had a look at Quickflix offering on my Sony Bravia but the subscription deal turns me off. I don’t like that I’d still pay $14.99 (for Streaming Now) a month even if I didn’t watch anything.
Glenn
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 5:32 PMQuickflix integration into consoles will probably be the winner for me… If Telstra are going to have it stream to Web and T-box only, I am not buying another device.
I also don’t care if it goes against my cap, I’ll just upgrade from the Bigpond 200GB to the Bigpond 500GB plan!
Wayne
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 11:07 PMI’ve had a look at Quickflix streaming via my BluRay player and it works really well. Only snag is that all the movies currently available are old titles, which makes $15 per month look excessive. If / when they can show me recent titles, then I’ll definitely take another look.