SeeSaw Launches Paid Options, Starting At £0.99

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By Mark Sweney: SeeSaw, the video-on-demand website born from the ashes of the failed Project Kangaroo, has launched a paid-for service with 1,000 hours of programming from 99p per episode up to £17.99 for a series.

The VoD operator, which is owned by Arqiva, officially launched in February offering 3,000 hours of free programming including Home and Away, Neighbours, Hollyoaks, Skins, Kingdom and Doc Martin. This programming will remain free.

SeeSaw has today unveiled 1,000 hours of new content as part of its subscription offering, including new deals with Comedy Central for programmes including South Park and MTV for shows such as The Hills and Laguna Beach.

The paid-for content also includes new BBC Worldwide shows such as Fawlty Towers, Planet Earth, Spooks, Top Gear, the Royle Family, Gavin & Stacey, I’m Alan Partridge and Only Fools and Horses. It is also thought that a deal has been struck with Disney (NYSE: DIS) to allow users to rent programming including Lost and Ugly Betty.

The company has launched a rental model that will allow single programmes to be rented for up to 30 days with 48 hours for viewing to be completed once a show has started to be watched. For whole series, viewers will have 90 days rental and 48 hours to complete the viewing of each episode.

Charges are between 99p and £1.19 per episode. For a series, prices will vary widely from £3.99 to £17.99 depending on the number of episodes in the series and how recently the programme has aired on TV.

The charging structure, and programming that users will have to pay for, is broadly similar to the regimes run by rival services such as Channel 4’s 4oD and Channel Five’s Demand Five.

SeeSaw, which aims to be a “one-stop shop” for online TV programming, is planning to increase the amount of content to 5,000 hours and is already looking at widening its distribution beyond PCs.

Arqiva is one of the partners in Project Canvas, the joint venture to bring VoD content to digital viewers with Freeview and Freesat, which the Office of Fair Trading yesterday cleared of requiring a competition investigation.

Robert adds: The new TV campaigns for SeeSaw’s phase two are rather different from its initial, market-entry campaign

This article originally appeared in © Guardian News & Media Ltd..

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