SANTA MONICA and TORONTO – On Friday, a new way to distribute new movies will launch in California which will see very new first run movies available on broadband.
ClickStar, a partnership between chipmaker Intel and actor Morgan Freeman’s production company Revelations Entertainment will sell first run movies, some as recent as a week or two after their theatrical debut. If it starts a trend, that impacts existing sales windows (DVD, PPV, VOD, etc.) for movie content.
The company has agreements with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, but has not yet announced what titles will be made available.
The first feature will be Brad Silberling’s 10 Items or Less, starring Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega. It makes its broadband debut on December 15 exclusively on ClickStar, just two weeks after its theatrical release. ClickStar will also launch three Artist-Created channels including Our Space hosted by Morgan Freeman, Jersey Docs from Danny DeVito and Peter Bogdanovich’s Golden Age of Movies.
The new portal goes to market with a library of several hundred major studio titles and will allow full-length movie downloads online at www.cstar.com and through ClickStar’s portal on Windows Media Center PCs with Intel’s Viiv technology.
While the web site says it wants to go global, it’s not clear whether or not ClickStar will be limited to downloads from the United States or if it will extend into Canada.
Speaking of Extend, Toronto’s ExtendMedia is behind the broadband content management platform that serves as the foundation of ClickStar. Using a new version of ExtendMedia’s software, OpenCASE, ClickStar accelerated time to market, trimmed estimated launch costs, and future-proofed its infrastructure to support scalability and growth, says the press release. Most importantly Extend’s software allowed ClickStar to create a strategic platform of trust to power the service’s eCommerce facilities and assure content rights are preserved, it said.
"ClickStar’s work with Extend software typifies the embrace of so-called white label broadband video solutions – projected to become a US$1.9 billion market by 2011 – and the opportunity for such solutions providers to propel the online content industry to greater revenues at lower cost.
“At ClickStar our business mission is to build a direct relationship between artists and consumers while decreasing the time window between theatrical release and content availability online,” said James Ackerman, CEO of ClickStar.
“Major broadband content players are evolving away from one-off, promotional deployments and toward fully featured, integrated online businesses,” said Will Richmond, president of Broadband Directions, LLC, a market intelligence and consulting firm specializing in broadband-delivered video. “As ClickStar’s experience shows, succeeding in these time consuming and complex initiatives necessitates enterprise-class software and services able to support myriad customer requirements.”
“Building effective online content businesses requires strategic thinking, deep, broad enterprise class technology, and a genuine partnership that bring other players to the table to make that business work,” said Keith Kocho, founder of ExtendMedia.
