In a world that’s going more and more mobile with each passing day, offering new mobile services is definitely a good way for lots of companies to increase their revenues.
So it’s no wonder that Microsoft is now in talks with Blockbuster, the famous chain of DVD and video game rental stores, in order to develop a service that should provide instant access to any movie, via any handset that runs on Windows Mobile.
According to The Dallas Morning News, Blockbuster intends to develop said services based on Microsoft’s Live Mesh platform. This uses a device’s Internet connection for data sharing, which means that the upcoming mobile movie services will only work on handsets that are connected to the Web.
For the moment, there is no word on when the new services will be publicly available.
However, according to Keith Morrow, chief information officer at Blockbuster, the new technology could be first used in airports, allowing travelers to download movies via Blockbuster kiosks to their phones or PMPs. Sounds nice, isn’t it?
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Written by Ilinca Nita on December 1st, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Blockbuster has begun small-scale trials of their online movie rental service, using the Movielink video-download technology the acquired last year. Starting this week, 500 beta testers have been invited to start using the service; the company will charge $2 per rental and $8 per full movie purchase.
The testers have been selected from the company’s Total Access members, and will be asked to provide feedback on topics such as usability, stability and - most importantly - whether they are likely to use the service again. More subscribers will be included in the beta next week, and the formal launch will occur sometime in August.
Currently titles are available to rent once they are released for video-on-demand, but not to purchase until the DVD version is available. There’s also likely work going on behind the scenes attempting to simplify watching downloaded content on a TV; at present it’s described as “tricky”, a word unlikely to appeal to users who just want to pay and watch. Currently the Movielink client is Windows only; there’s no word on when (or even if) a Mac version will be released.
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Written by Chris Davies on July 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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Surprise surprise.. Blockbuster Inc. announced that they were abandoning their bid to acquire Circuit City citing that a deal was “not in the movie rental company’s best interest amid current market conditions.” Umm.. wait a second.. even if the market conditions were better, did this deal ever really make much sense? Apparently Soleil Securities analyst Scott Tilghman thought the same - “We didn’t believe that such a debt-laden marriage made sense and questioned the potential synergies that Blockbuster believed might have existed.” Circuit City shares fell 15 percent to $2.17 a share after the news broke while Blockbuster shares rose 13.9 percent to $2.86 a share.
[Check it out via Reuters]
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Written by flung on July 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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Blockbuster has made public that it is offering to purchase Circuit City for at least 6 dollars a share - subject to due diligence. According to Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes, the two companies have been discussing a possible sale since the end of last year. The offer was originally made on February 17th but Circuit City has failed to provide the due diligence necessary to allow Blockbuster to make a more “definitive offer.” The company has decided to make the offer public “because it believes the shareholders of Circuit City should have the opportunity to participate in determining the destiny of the company.”
According to a public letter from Blockbuster, the “combination of the two companies would result in an $18 billion global retail enterprise uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growing convergence of media content and electronic devices.”
You can read more about the offer here:
[Check it out via News.com]
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Written by flung on April 14th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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The actual price would be somewhere between 1 and 1.3 billion dollars, but that’s still a lot of coin. Both companies are suffering, and both companies could probably use the boost that this would offer to each of them so it’s a wonder why Circuit City has been sitting on its hands with this offer since February 17th.
Circuit City posted a $200 million loss towards the end of 2007. Blockbuster is constantly battling Netflix, as well as its other Brick and Mortar competitors and the loss that online movie download services have brought the company.
Together they would make an $18 billion a year company and both would likely save money from the several synergies they could create, especially the fact that they’d be able to combine the video purchasing efforts from their suppliers. Furthermore, if Blockbuster does in fact come out with a set top box, Circuit City would be the perfect platform to launch such a product.
[via Crave]
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Written by James Allan Brady on April 14th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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When it comes to getting my gadget or video game fix and I don’t want to wait for something to ship from an online store it’s off to Best Buy or Circuit City for me. I also like to watch lots of movies and I am in the movie store almost every Tuesday looking for something cool to watch and Blockbuster is a store of choice. It seems that Blockbuster and Circuit City could see a merger at some time in the near future.
Blockbuster announced today that it has offered to buy Circuit City for $6.00 per share in cash with the offer subject to due diligence. Blockbuster says that the offer was made in a letter sent to Circuit City Chairman and CEO Philip Schoonover on February 17 on behalf of the Blockbuster Board of Directors.
The catch is that Blockbuster says that Circuit City has failed to provide the necessary due diligence to allow Blockbuster to make a final offer for the company. According to Blockbuster it decided to make the offer public to allow Circuit City shareholders to have the chance to determine the destiny of Circuit City. Blockbuster says that the offer to buy Circuit City is conditional on timely commencement of due diligence and that it has other strategic opportunities.
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Written by Shane McGlaun on April 14th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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This was a long week with no major events occurring, but there were some pretty big announcements. For starters we have a new BitTorrent Set Top Box from Myka, no more will you have to waste power by leaving your entire computer running all night just to get the latest screener from FXG or aXXo, and this little set top box will do it for you and then play it right from its hard drive for added ease. Then there were rumors abound of Blockbuster potentially putting out a new Set Top Box to push their movies, TV Shows, and other content out to.
Next up, a new guy and/or company landed on the scene, the name, Van Der Led. So far we’ve heard about the new Asus Eee look alike from the company called Jisus, and then later this past week we wrote about a new cell phone watch from the same name, it’s all kind of fishy, but we’ll see. Speaking of Asus Eee-like computers, we first saw some reviews of the new HP Mini-Note coming from various sites, then later this past week we discovered that they’d gone on sale on HP’s site with an advertised ship date of April 15th. Lastly, in line with budget PC’s, Everex pushed out a new one, their MyMiniPC small form factor desktop PC that had a new version of gOS Space with the whole package being customized for MySpace users the world over.
Still on the topic of Notebooks, Toshiba released several new models including the A300, M300, P300, and U400 series’ of notebooks and extended the X205 SLI line by two new models. Toshiba also pushed out some new REGZA television sets ranging from 52-32-inches in size with most of them packing hard drives and built in DVRs as well as a ton of ports including 3 Ethernet NICs making these TV’s more connected than my computer. In other TV news Mitsubishi announced the name of its line of upcoming laser TV’s, thusly dubbed LaserVue.
In other news, Buffalo expanded their LinkStation line to include one of the first remotely portable models, it uses two 500GB laptop hard drives, a quite, small, fan-less case design, it offers up all of the lovable features of their LS line including the 1TB of storage space in a package small enough to fit in your hand. RedPost has upgraded their product lineup from the RedPost/Kit to the new RedPost SignBeta. Also, the BBC’s newest iPlayer has been expanded from the computer, to the iPhone/iPod Touch, and now to the Wii and is causing considerable network strain over in the UK leaving Internet providers looking to the BBC to cough up all or part of the estimated 831 million pounds needed to upgrade the network.
In Mobile news, we got an invite to go to an event being hosted by HTC in London on May 6th where we believe they’ll be unveiling their first Android Phone, rumored to be called the HTC Dream. Speaking of Android, we spotted a Nokia N810 that was running Android, and I must say it looked pretty amazing; hopefully they finish up the coding on the project so more N810 users can adopt the new Android OS.
Lastly in gaming news, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed got a release date of September 17th, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has entered alpha testing. Microsoft is rumored to be working on a Wiimote-like controller for their Xbox 360 system which would be great for games much like the upcoming Star Wars title. There was also lots of news regarding Grand Theft Auto IV; the most interesting is that a shortage of the game is expected in the UK, who would have thought they’d enjoy frolicking around killing anyone and everyone in some random city.
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Written by James Allan Brady on April 13th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Blockbuster has been rumored to have been secretly working on some new technology in the works that would allow streaming video content from an online rental service direct to consumers televisions, and could be available as soon as the next few weeks. No information has been given on the exact technology or price but the service could again bring the home video renting giant back up to par and possibly ahead in technology, compared to other rival video renting services from Netflix and Apple.
Netflix would be directly affected by this new service by Blockbuster and has recently upgraded their service to provide unlimited streaming to some subscribers, however it streams to their computer and not necessarily to the living room of most consumers. In order to work their way into more entertainment centers, Netflix is also looking into providing streaming video rentals through Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console.
Apple is another competitor in the streaming-to-TV market with the Apple TV which hasn’t been a complete success but with Apple TV Take Two, allows users to order and stream movies directly from their TV instead of having to use a computer in between.
Although details were not given, sources cite that the service will be provided through MovieLink which was acquired by Blockbuster last year and was a joint venture between MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner.
via Hollywood Reporter
Written by Darrin Olson on April 12th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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