Warner Bros on Tuesday started testing a service that offers select movies for purchase or rental through the public pages of these movies on the world’s largest online social network.
Starting on Tuesday, Facebook users who visit the official page of Batman: The Dark Knight can click a “watch” icon and pay 30 Facebook credits, or US$3, to watch the movie. The movie is streamed through a Facebook application.
Renters have access to a movie for 48 hours and can replay it as many times as they like. Warner Bros said it would add other movies in coming months, but did not say what those would be.
The page had nearly 4 million “likes” as of Tuesday afternoon.
Another page, called simply Dark Knight, had about 2 million — but this is not the official Warner Bros page and the movie isn’t available through it.
Warner Bros didn’t say how much it would cost to buy movies.
“Making our films available through Facebook is a natural extension of our digital distribution efforts,” said Thomas Gewecke, president of Warner Bros Digital Distribution, in a statement.
The offering is only open to people in the US.
“While officially dubbed a test, we expect to see more studios get behind the effort given the large platform and higher price point,” wrote Jefferies analyst Youssef Squali in a note to investors.
He added that he sees the Facebook-Warner Bros deal as “yet another caution sign” against movie rental company Netflix Inc’s high stock value.
Netflix lost US$11.95, or 5.8 percent, to close at US$195.45. Time Warner Inc, which owns Warner Bros, fell US$0.35 to close at US$36.43.
“With Facebook’s entry, the competitive playing field is getting crowded,” Squali said. “We expect this competition to curtail Netflix’s subscriber growth and drive higher content costs, impacting revenue growth and margins over time.”
Netflix had no comment.
Separately, some of Sony Corp’s movies sold through Apple Inc’s iTunes store are now available with extra features that enable people to search scenes for actors and bits of dialogue by typing terms into a computer.
Other features allow viewers to choose clips to share on Facebook and Twitter and check where songs from a soundtrack appear. A link to the iTunes store makes music purchases easy.
All three features are available now on Burlesque and The Others Guys. The non-music features are available on Salt and Resident Evil: Afterlife and will be available on The Tourist, when it is released on March 22.
Studio senior vice president Rich Berger said in a statement that adding the features boosts the value of Sony’s digital movies and makes them more collectable.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
RSS