Blockbuster’s OnDemand video streaming box was promised before the holidays, and Dave Zatz has just taken delivery of his. The 2Wire-made streamer offers access to over 2,100 titles, including movies and TV shows; first-impressions suggest it’s a neat, if initially frustrating, option.
Blockbuster have announced their on-demand set-top box, the MediaPoint, using 2Wire’s streaming video player. The MediaPoint box itself will be offered “free” to anyone who buys the $99 package “25 first-run movies, TV shows, foreign or classic films” in advance; individual titles cost $1.99 each after that.
Although just a rumor before, we can now confirm that Blockbuster will be building a set-top box that can stream movies to your TV in digital format. In fact, if all goes well, we can expect a release date sometime in the holiday season, which is swiftly approaching.
Blockbuster has begun small-scale trials of their online movie rental service, using the Movielink video-download technology the acquired last year. Starting this week, 500 beta testers have been invited to start using the service; the company will charge $2 per rental and $8 per full movie purchase.
The actual price would be somewhere between 1 and 1.3 billion dollars, but that’s still a lot of coin. Both companies are suffering, and both companies could probably use the boost that this would offer to each of them so it’s a wonder why Circuit City has been sitting on its hands with this offer since February 17th.
This was a long week with no major events occurring, but there were some pretty big announcements. For starters we have a new BitTorrent Set Top Box from Myka, no more will you have to waste power by leaving your entire computer running all night just to get the latest screener from FXG or aXXo, and this little set top box will do it for you and then play it right from its hard drive for added ease. Then there were rumors abound of Blockbuster potentially putting out a new Set Top Box to push their movies, TV Shows, and other content out to.
There are tons of rumors flying around that are substantiated by little more than the fact that someone wrote them, that Blockbuster is working a new Set-Top Box to push movies out to. Some are calling it an Apple TV competitor, but I highly doubt it will be.
SlashGear JP
