DB7

Film website offers DVDs to burn

DVD rental service Lovefilm is to be the first UK company to let customers download movies and burn them to a DVD.

About 100 titles from two major film studios will be available when the service launches in April, with prices starting at £9.99 per movie.

The company already offers about 2,500 films for download, but these have to be watched on a PC.

In a separate announcement, Lovefilm said it would start offering free movie downloads sponsored by advertisers.

Christian Bale's The Machinist and Guy Pearce's The Proposition are among the first films to be given away in the deal.


Although Lovefilm is the first to offer films to copy to DVD in the UK, similar services are already available in the Australia, the US and France.

"Download-to-burn is the next step in the evolution of movie purchasing and viewing," said the company's chief executive Simon Calver.

"Whereas consumers may have been reluctant to watch films directly on their PC, they now have the choice to burn a huge library of films to DVD and watch them on their preferred medium of choice, and all without having to leave their living room."

It takes between half-an-hour and 90 minutes to download a film, depending on its length and the speed of a user's internet connection.

tvden

I like the words Free movie downloads sponsored by advertisers !!!! I suppose it would be a bit like a free newspaper dvd

ChristineCB

Great news... I will be very curious to see the quality of the video-audio once the product is delivered. 60-90 minutes? Hmmm, indeed.

Still, it's sub-perfect-DVD quality - good enough for TV viewing - something like that could picque the consumers' interest to buy the Real Thing.

Much like "Real DVD Extras" have let moviegoers enjoy the DVD as not only a collectible but sometimes a Must-Have item in those earth-shattering coffeeshop conversations.

And then there tech-nuts like (oops - no names!!) who know how to do the real thing-! Ooooh, the sly one.

DB7

Most dvd torrents weigh in at 500mb+ so if they're are promising that a film can be download in 30-90 minutes there may be some loss of quality. They don't state what format they will be using - I presume an ISO that can easily be burnt with Nero.

It's a step in the right direction; if they wish to combat a degree of piracy then a film equivilant to Itunes is required with a large catalogue.

MarkG

Why pay 9.99 to download a DVD and then burn it to disk, when I can just buy the DVD for a fiver from an online store?

Free sounds OK though... but I presume there'll be non-skippable ads.

MarkG

If they just download a .iso file then the sound format doesn't matter: it's contained in the disk image.