MSN’s Cinema Push

MSN subscribers will soon have easier access to films and cinema, thanks to three new deals. MSN has signed deals with CinemaNow, Blockbuster and MovieTickets to allow subscribers to download films over the internet, rent DVDs and buy cinema tickets online.

“MSN is rolling out the red carpet to movie fans across the nation with easy access to renting, downloading or buying movie tickets online — making it the only Web destination for finding both old favorites and new releases through a simple click of the mouse,” said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of the MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform division at Microsoft.

MSN’s deal with CinemaNow will provide broadband subscribers with more than 2,000 films and hours of TV content for download or streaming to their PCs. The MSN customised version of CinemaNow will offer content from 20th Century Fox, Disney, MGM and others.

Subscribers will also be able to rent up to three DVDs at a time from Blockbuster 25,000 title library for US$20.

For those of us who still prefer seeing their films in the old school way – actually visiting a cinema, MSN has renewed and expanded their deal with MovieTickets.com to offer online ticket booking at 750 cinemas from 32 theatre chains.

Movies at MSN

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?