Tuesday, March 7, 2006
AOL Planning Paid Download Service
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 10:00 AM
"AOL will add paid video downloads to its Web site later this year, the company has confirmed to BetaNews. The new paid portion of the site would complement its pre-existing free service in hopes of cashing in on a booming market brought to life by Apple and its iTunes Music Store. The paid downloads would be gradually introduced into a planned rework of AOL's online video on-demand service, the company said. Programming would come from Time Warner properties and other partners, and would sell for $1.99 USD per download. iTunes offers the the same pricing. Eventually, the company plans to move to a variable price structure, which it hopes would entice programmers turned off by Apple's insistence on a standard cost for both video and audio sold through its iTunes service."
Interesting that they don't mention Google video as a competitor at all. Anyways, it looks like this service is going to be almost half the price of Google's service at about $1.99 per download. Since the DRM question invariably going to come up, it looks like AOL's service will support Microsoft's digital rights management software. So I guess they will be going after the PMC market as well.
Interesting that they don't mention Google video as a competitor at all. Anyways, it looks like this service is going to be almost half the price of Google's service at about $1.99 per download. Since the DRM question invariably going to come up, it looks like AOL's service will support Microsoft's digital rights management software. So I guess they will be going after the PMC market as well.
