Stream the Starz with Vongo
The launch of Vongo, a new streaming entertainment site, was announced today. The service offers streaming content from the Starz premium cable channel to internet users for a flat $9.99 a month subscription fee. The subscription service basically lets users watch movies, concerts, and specials created for the cable channel on their desktops, laptops or other PC-based video device.
Vongo has an exclusive deal with Starz, so these are movies that you can’t stream from any other internet service (as of right now). Vongo subscribers will also be able to rent movies on a $3.99 pay-per-view basis roughly six months before they land on the basic Vongo streaming package.
It’s another baby step towards viable content distribution for Hollywood movies, big news in an industry that’s been largely ignoring the internet for half a decade. It has a few shortfalls, the largest of which is the fact that Vongo doesn’t offer an exclusive service. If you subscribe to Starz and you have a digital cable box, you can watch the same content on your television on demand in most markets. Also, the service uses Windows Media Video (so it won’t work on your iPod) and is inaccessible to Mac users, as evidenced by this screen capture from my iBook running Firefox:
Still, it’s a start. The internet has the bandwidth and the user base to distribute content for a price, as the iTunes Music Store has shown. Also, other stream/rent Hollywood movie services like Movielink have been around for four or five years. But these legit services are starting to crop up in greater numbers now that the power of the net as a selling space is unavoidable even to the most jaded Hollywood execs. Look for HBO/Cinemax to hit back with their own service soon.
So here’s the big question: Will users pay for content they can get on their televisions and TiVos for about the same price? More importantly, will users pay to rent movies they can download (illegally) over BitTorrent for no charge?
