YouTube has launched a fresh Movies category on its website, gathering about 400 full-length films for your on-demand viewing pleasure, all free of charge.
The renewed section, which is actually more like the next step in previously announced projects, comes courtesy of deals the Google company struck with U.S. studios like Lionsgate, MGM and Sony Pictures and UK service Blinkbox. → Read More
Video-on-Demand movie site, blinkbox is launching the first optimised legal movie streaming service for Playstation 3 owners in the UK. It’s featuring recent DVD releases like Avatar, The Hangover and Sherlock Holmes. The PS3 is now optimised for iPlayer and YouTube, but blinkbox wants to win the race to get blockbuster movies into increasingly web-enabled homes. In effect it wants to become a UK based Netflix. The site now has an archive of 6,000 movie and TV titles.
However, of course, the UK startup in this space which already has tonnes of traction via its DVD rental business is Lovefilm which already has streaming available. And Blinkbox is also competing with PS3′s own movie rental and to-own VOD service.
So this makes it yet another attempt to get traction for blinkbox, which started off as a service letting users overlay a video clip taken from a movie or TV show with a personalised message at the beginning. → Read More
[UK] Online film and TV aggregator BlinkBox has gone all arty on us, signing a content partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI) — bringing the total number of British TV and film titles on offer to over five hundred and the total number of “premium” titles available on the service to just under six thousand.
Seeing BlinkBox, arguably, go a little up market with the BFI partnership sits a little at odds with the company’s recent credit crunch-busting Pizza Hut promotion or its long term ‘viral’ marketing strategy whereby users can create movie clips – referred to as ‘Blinks’ – to share with friends via email or SMS. But hey, more choice is always welcome. → Read More
A new UK startup launches on Monday called BlinkBox. Users take pre-created clips from movies and television shows (the clips can be shortened by the user) and add a personalized message at the beginning. The clips can then be shared via a link, embed or mobile device. Here’s an example of (a very funny) one that was created for me. There’s a pretty deep catalog of movies and TV shows to view. The company’s business model is to pitch buying or renting the movie or tv show after viewing the clip. They’ve built their own (heavily DRM’d) platform for delivering this content to buyers, although it only works on Windows machines at this time. The concept is similar to Slingbox’s Clip+Sling, which allows Slingbox users to create short content clips and share it with friends. The site is not working 100% for me – embeds don’t work and most of the clips can’t be selected when creating a blink. This may be pre-launch jitters, or licensing issues restricting me because I’m U.S. based (it’s launching only in the UK for now). We have more on this at TechCrunch UK. → Read More
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