unmediated

T/W, Cingular: On Demand

Warner Brothers and AOL are preparing an Internet service that lets fans watch full episodes from more than 100 old television series, reports the New York Times. The service, called In2TV, will be free, supported by advertising, and will start early next year. More than 4,800 episodes will be made available online in the first year.

Programs on In2TV will have one to two minutes of commercials for each half-hour episode, compared with eight minutes in a standard broadcast. The Internet commercials cannot be skipped.

America Online, which is making a broad push into Internet video, will distribute the service on its Web portal. Both it and Warner Brothers are Time Warner units. An enhanced version of the service will use peer-to-peer file-sharing technology to get the video data to viewers.

Warner, with 800 television programs in its library, says it is the largest TV syndicator. It wants to use the Internet to reach viewers rather than depend on the whims of cable networks and local TV stations, said Eric Frankel, the president of Warner Brothers' domestic cable distribution division.

Other recent internet video offerings include a deal with ABC and Apple iPods for $1.99 downloads of hit tv series. NBC and CBS also announced last week that they would sell reruns of their top new shows for 99 cents an episode through video-on-demand services. CBS is working with Comcast and NBC with DirecTV.

The NY Times says next month AOL will introduce TMZ, an entertainment news service, in a joint venture with another Warner Brothers division, Telepictures Productions. TMZ, named for the 30-mile zone around Hollywood that is mentioned in some film-union contracts, will mix breaking entertainment news and gossip with a database of information and video about celebrities.

TMZ and most of AOL's programming effort, so far, have been built largely around short video segments, reflecting the conventional view that Internet users are less likely to want to watch full-length programs on a computer screen.

AOL will offer a version of the service meant to be watched on a television set connected to a Windows Media Center PC, and it is exploring a similar arrangement to link the Internet programming to television through TiVo video recorders.

For those who want to watch on a big screen, AOL is introducing optional technology called AOL Hi-Q. To use the technology, viewers will have to agree to participate in a special file-sharing network. This approach helps AOL reduce the cost of distributing-high quality video files by passing portions of the video files from one user's computer to another. AOL says that since it will control the network, it can protect users from the sorts of viruses and spyware that infect other peer-to-peer systems.

AOL is using file-sharing technology from Kontiki, a Silicon Valley company providing a similar system to the ambitious Internet video program of the BBC.

Other recent VOD announcements include:

• Cingular Wireless introduced a radio service for its mobile phone customers today, using about 40 channels of commercial-free music from Music Choice and MobiTV's streaming media service. The Cingular service runs over their data connections service. Cingular also plans a song download service similar to Sprint's. MobiTV also delivers video clips to Cingular and Sprint mobile phones.

  

• Yahoo and TiVo are teaming up to blend TV and the Web. The service will allow TiVo users to program their DVRs remotely using Yahoo's web site.

  Yahoo TV offers show times, program descriptions and cast photographs as well as exclusive content like information from "Entertainment Tonight" and others. Subscribers with a TiVo Series2 box and a standard Yahoo ID may use the service, the companies said. TiVo has some 254,000 subscribers, down from 288,000 a year earlier. Key to that drop was a 5 percent decline in new customers from DirecTV, its biggest source of new customers, which has said it plans to cease marketing TiVo's product.

• Comcast and CBS are teaming for VOD. Beginning in January, Comcast digital cable customers will be able to view episodes of popular shows anytime after midnight on the nights the shows air. Comcast will charge $0.99 a pop for each on-demand episode.

• DIRECTV and NBC announced a deal for programming on demand. It will give consumers access to the top programs of NBC and its cable entertainment networks, USA, SCI FI and Bravo, within hours after they air, commercial free, for 99 cents. The programs will be available on demand through the new DIRECTV Plus interactive DVR which will be available at retailers such as Best Buy and Circuit City this month.

• Last month Disney announced a pact with Apple to make several ABC and Disney Channel shows available for download via iTunes for $1.99 per episode.


• Google's Video search beta will search through archives of recent closed caption television broadcasts. At present the service is limited to a handful of US television stations - ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN.

• Yahoo said it plans to move video search to its home page and introduce its own closed-captioning text search, partnering with content providers Bloomberg and the BBC. Unlike the Google service, Yahoo's offering will let users watch 60-second video clips.

  

• AOL Video enable you to search for and play back thousands of free video clips.

Other movie download services include the studio-backed MovieLink, Walt Disney's over-the-air MovieBeam, Starz Encore, CinemaNow and soon Netflicks.