Motorola to put Blockbusters on handsets

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Motorola to put Blockbusters on handsets

By PETER WHITE

Published: 20 August, 2009

READ MORE: Motorola | Applications (Media) | Handset

The 15,000 films there are available on Blockbuster's OnDemand online movie network will be made available on selected Motorola mobile phones. That seems straightforward, but given the amount of detail that the two have issued, it isn't.

It's easy to imagine that this means the films are streamed over a cellular network, but somehow, given that AT&T in particular and US carriers in general, are very careful about what service they allow or don't allow over their networks, it is unlikely that this is how Motorola expects this service to pan out.

And given that the Blockbuster OnDemand service is only available right now in the US, then Motorola has to anticipate one of the major networks, probably one of the two CDMA networks in Verizon and Sprint, allowing the handsets that this throws up, to be connected to their networks.

The announcement, as far as it goes, is fairly straightforward, that the application which looks after delivering Blockbuster progressive download movies to consumer electronics devices, will be ported to select Motorola phones. No service pricing and no delivery date for the application were given but we'd guess that the price will be the same as the existing film prices, varying between $2.50 and $4.00 per film, and the application will probably take no more than 3 to 4 months to port and test.

There will be lots of readers immediately asking if people really want to watch movies on a phone. Well THEY DO. That much has been proven in overseas markets where mobile TV is popular, and it is especially true as long as the viewer can stop the film when they get to work and begin watching it again in their lunch hour, in other words it is better as a download than a stream or a TV channel and in order to start watching it without delay, it needs to be a "progressive" download, one that you can begin watching before the download has completed.

But what cellular operator would want to let its customers watch an entire two hour film over their network, when this interferes with talking and other revenue earning activities, while taking up huge amounts of data traffic.

What Blockbuster is trying to do is build an ecosystem of devices which includes PCs, portable media players, Blu-ray Disc players, personal video recorders (PVRs), set-top boxes, web-connected television sets and mobile handsets, an eco-system to beat its fierce rival in online films, Netflix.

What we expect is that this application will be limited to a download format that will only play on the phone, but which is delivered either over wi-fi direct to the phone or to a PC for later sideloading to the phone, rather than cellular delivery. But that will still mean being able to watch films on the go and it is every bit as good as video from iTunes, but with way more movies.

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