AOL will launch a promotion offer, “Winter Movie Special”, in the US today giving their broadband subscribers access to download and watch some of the movies on MovieLink for only 99c per film.
Once the movie has downloaded, it can be watched as many times as the payee feels they can bear, but it must be watched within 30 days of the download or it will self-delete. The 99c offer is up to 80% less than current MovieLink customer spend, but only a select number of films will be available at that price, the other 600 films that MovieLink has can be watched for the normal $3.95 to $4.99.
AOL who have been losing large amounts of their subscribers, they lost nearly 700,000 dialup customer in the final quarter of 2003, are very keen to stop this slide and hope that bundled content deals will persuade people.
Movielink, the joint venture of six of the big Hollywood studios (Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros) has, in the past, received criticism of the breadth and quality of the films they offer, despite their recent upgrade to version MoveLink 2.0.
Commenting on the AOL deal, Jim Ramo chief executive of Movielink said “This is our first promotion with a major portal, and we’d like to do it with all the major portals,” he added hopefully.
The promotion will last until Feb. 26, and the companies do not have specific plans to extend it beyond that date.
We see many more deal like this coming along as broadband providers make offers, try to keep hold of the subscribers, and more significantly, as more computer become able to show content on the household TV.