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Hoyts Stream to launch early 2014

Hoyts Corp. will launch Video-on-Demand streaming service Hoyts Stream in early 2014, roughly 12 months later than the originally targeted date.

The service will offer new release films to rent or buy, concurrent with the DVD window, plus library product and TV content.

It will enter a competitive market where the players include Big Pond Movies, Foxtel's Presto, Ezyflix.tv, JB Hi-Fi’s digital service, Fetch TV and Quickflix.

When Hoyts announced a partnership in March with digital delivery service provider Viocorp, it said it aimed to launch Hoyts Stream in the third quarter of this year.

Explaining the delay, Hoyts said in a statement to IF, “We are continuing to finalise our road map with all key technology partners. We want to ensure that all relevant updates to technology are picked up in our platform development. Release date will be in early 2014.”

Hoyts hasn’t yet announced licensing deals with the US majors but the company said, “We are continuing to work through contractual negotiations with all key content providers including Hollywood studios and independent distributors.”

The intention is to convert customers of its DVD rental business Hoyts Kiosk to watching movies digitally and to tap into the 550,000 members of the Hoyts Insider Club and Hoyts Rewards loyalty program.

In addition to transactional VoD, Hoyts Stream will offer a Subscription Video-on-Demand option and electronic sell through, but it hasn’t said when the latter two services will come on stream.

  1. Whats the point of streaming movies during the DVD rental period. Just gonna end up competing with a bunch of other streaming services for no real gain. Start streaming movies the same day as theatre release, try something different.

  2. I don’t bother with streaming services, I simply download movies (legally of course), then I can simply watch the movies on any device. It works out much cheaper also. Check out buymoviescapital.com which I what I use.

  3. Quote: Steev – “Start streaming movies the same day as theatre release, try something different.”

    I agree. The reason that the big piracy groups survive is because of lack of accountability and/or tracking.

    The only people who get taken to court for movie/music piracy are the foolish ones of whom only upload a small amount and don’t understand how to bypass the tracking mechanisms.

    Trying to make an example of poor people
    who pirate copyrighted works just makes the big piracy groups ensure they are more careful so that they are not tracked.

    Considering that this is a business model, I would be asking exactly what niche market audience/customer base they are trying to target if I were considering investing.

    Movie companies have 2 choices:

    1) Allow the purchase of streaming online in an absolute minimal time frame (no more than a week)

    2) Invest in a D-Wave Quantum computer to calculate erroneous packets to be distributed amongst the peers

    Option 1 is cheaper, and option 2 will only last as long as it takes to update the hash mechanism and protocol.

    If you choose option 2, can I have the computer when you’re done with it? I have this idea about determinism…

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