Civic to pump home movies down the line
By NATHAN COCHRANE
Tuesday 11 April 2000
it.fairfax.com.au
Going virtual: Tony Aduckiewicz.
A JOINT venture to provide videos on demand to homes using high-speed digital subscriber-line Internet access, majority-owned by rental company Civic Video, will seek an exchange listing by November.
Video On Demand Pty Ltd CEO and Civic Video managing director, Tony Aduckiewicz, said the service would initially be offered next month to multi-dwelling units and hotels in Sydney and Melbourne. A Canberra service through the ACT elecricity and water supply company ACTEW's broadband network, TransAct, will be launched soon after.
Aduckiewicz said the service was aimed at the high end of the market, typically households on high incomes but with little leisure time. He did not expect it to cut into video rental sales much initially.
"Would it burglarise our own rental market? I don't think so," Aduckiewicz said. "It may bleed off some of our market, but not much."
The service will use MediaHawk video-on-demand servers provided by US company Concurrent. Users will have the same level of control over a downloaded video as they would over a VHS tape, such as play, pause, rewind and fast forward.
He said the decision to go direct to the customer using a dedicated broadband connection came from a six-month research project. Civic Video discovered revenues were flat and many high-value households were not renting movies because the process took too long. Under the new service, Aduckiewicz said, "click, you watch a video, click, you go to bed".
Civic Video will tie in other business-to-consumer services, such as banking, food ordering and possibly telephony, also providing original content to support the service. Online renters will be able to profile their favorite types of movies and have intelligent agent technology find suitable matches. Some content, such as selected older back catalogue titles, will be free.
Rental costs will be about the same per video as a tape from a library and access costs are expected to "be about half current cable costs", Aduckiewicz said. Customers will have the option to buy outright or lease their DSL modem.
Deployment throughout Australia, riding on the ACCC's declaration of the local copper loop last year, will be via Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line at about 8 Mbps downstream to the home and up to 2 Mbps back to the server. The Canberra TransAct roll-out, due to very short cable runs, will hit 52Mbps.
Aduckiewicz, who previously advised Dymocks on its online strategy, said video stores had to change with the market. Bookstores have implemented cafes and other amusements to make retailing more an experience for the customer. Video stores could offer movie trailers from cafe tables and other attractions, he said.
The move online would not necessarily erase video stores from high streets, he said, but could be a lucrative new revenue stream. "We will encourage franchisees to invest in the video-on-demand servers," Aduckiewicz said.
"There'll be an education process. (Rental store owners) are nervous; they wonder how it will affect business.
"But it has to happen because it's already happening in Tampa and Hawaii."
Video on Demand Pty Ltd would need a big injection of capital if it was to succeed, Aduckiewicz said. He said he was not concerned that the recent dive in technology stock prices could dissuade investors. |
