Audio Video News

Walt Disney Company is making good on its promise to deliver movies-on-demand.

On September 29, the company began offering its Moviebeam service to viewers in three cities: Jacksonville, FL; Salt Lake City, UT; and Spokane, WA. Using a digital technique called datacasting, Moviebeam content is beamed over-the-air to a Samsung-made set-top box, which contains a 160-gigabyte hard drive, claimed to have the capacity for 100 movies in the legacy video format. Datacasting piggybacks content onto available bandwidth in normal TV broadcasts.

Moviebeam subscribers will pay $6.99/month to stay on the system, plus a $29.95 activation fee. They will also pay $3.99 to view new titles, or $2.49 for older ones, which can be watched, paused, and reviewed as often as desired during a 24-hour period. Disney plans to change Moviebeam offerings by deleting ten old titles and adding ten new titles per week.

Disney hopes to make the system available nationwide in 2004. Should it win that level of market acceptance, the Moviebeam experiment could cost Disney in excess of $100 million. The payback, however, could be several times the investment. Disney is banking on widespread dissatisfaction with movie-rental late fees to drive Moviebeam. Company research shows that heavy movie renters typically pay $15/month in late fees, a fact that has helped boost the popularity of online DVD rental service Netflix.

Disney is also experimenting with low-cost non-returnable DVDs that go dark within 48 hours after being removed from their packages. Other entertainment possibilities include offering TV shows and music concerts on the Moviebeam model.