Deals To Show Top Hollywood, German Films on Web: T-Online

Europe's largest Internet service provider says it has deals to show top Hollywood and German films on the Internet on a video-on-demand basis, Reuters reported at midday October 13.

T-Online would have access to both the library and new films by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Constantin Film under this deal, Reuters said, with MGM Worldwide Television Distribution president Jim Griffiths telling the news wire it was a "landmark agreement speak(ing) to the promising future of video-on-demand worldwide."

MGM's library includes contemporary hits like Legally Blonde and The Silence of the Lambs and such vintages as the classic screen musicals which all but made and still secure the MGM image. The deal addes MGM and Constantin to a T-Online repertoire that includes Universal Pictures and Dreamworks films. 

While very few such video-on-demand projects have taken off with consumers thus far because of prolonged download time, Reuters said, T-Online's broadband project, T-Online Vision, due to launch by year's end, connects to regular television sets by way of a set-top box to the Web enabling the films to be seen on regular screens. 

T-Online's plan, Reuters said, was to pre-load between ten and fifteen popular films into the set-top box, due to be made by Fujitsu Siemens, according to T-Online's Martin Frommhold, who added that they plan to have up to 500 movies on offer when the new service begins and about a thousand in due course. The boxes are due to hit the shops by the middle of November.

He said new films would become available to the service when they're released on DVD, and subscribers would be charged between $3.52 and $4.69 for a 24-hour period to view the film for an unlimited amount of times. "We are thinking about pricing it similarly to what you pay when you rent a video cassette," he told Reuters.