Studios Preparing For New Download Services This Fall

Hopefully, this will finally kickstart the online movies market: studios are digitizing and preparing more of their movies to be available through the online movies srvices like Movielink, Cinemanow and other newcomers like MSN, Sony Connect, and yes, Target.com.

Sony is converting 500 movie titles to a digital format that can be downloaded and sold. Universal Pictures is preparing nearly 200 titles for digital online sale. And Warner Brothers has already digitized most of its library of 5,000 films and will start selling some of them online later this year.

Instead of the current practice of rentals, this will be download to own model, with pricing being set closer to the DVD, generally between $10 and $20.

But there will still be content restrictions: when they launch, the movies will be restricted to playing on a single computer with a TV hookup.

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