According to a report by Lara Sinclair in the Australian this morning, you could soon be downloading video on demand movies the same day as they are released on DVD. The information comes from Franchise Entertainment Group director Paul Uniacke, who says an unnamed studio is planning to offer On Demand movies from Foxtel, BigPond and TiVo on the same day as DVD releases by March next year.
At the moment, Apple currently offers movies from most studios the same day as the DVD release (and unless I’m mistaken, sometimes even earlier). But adding the release window to PayTV and TiVo is a good idea – I for one haven’t visited my local video store for almost two years. Hopefully all the studios will run with this idea – I don’t see how they would really lose any money this way.
Last week, Apple quietly stopped distributing NetShare, put it back up, and now appears to have pulled it again. But what could we expect? It was a piece of software allowing users to transform their iPhones into Wi-Fi hotspots.
This is why people get excited about iPhone apps. With Box Office, if you want to see a movie and don’t know what’s playing, you just open it up. It’ll detect where you are, find theatres around you, and list movies playing by their RottenTomatoes score. Want to get tickets? Click on the time you want and it’ll toss you to Fandango to buy them. You’ll get the whole process done in no time. If they added streaming trailers in to this app somehow, it’d really be taken to the next level, but even as is it’s one of our favourite apps so far that we’ll definitely be using all the time.
