Tag: RENTALS

Six movie studios have filed a federal lawsuit against Zediva -- a movie rental start-up that allows users to watch films shortly after they're released on DVD, but before they become available on services like Netflix or Redbox. According to Zediva's founder and chief executive, Venky Srinivasan, the company operates like any other brick-and-mortar DVD rental service. Users pay to rent ...

Dish Network has agreed to buy Blockbuster more than six months after the movie rental chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Dish "won" a bankruptcy court auction for the company, with a winning bid of $320 million, although negotiations pushed the final price down to a paltry $228 million. Tom Cullen, Dish Network's executive vice president of sales, marketing and programming, says his goal is ...

Not even 48 hours ago, your author completed one of the most arduous, mind-and-body-destroying adventures any New Yorker can undertake: moving within the five boroughs. With space at an ongoing premium, the city's horrid rental reputation is well-earned and frankly nightmarish. (I actually had one landlord show me a place without a sink. He did, however, argue that the bathtub is a great place ...

Warner Bros. has announced that five new movies are now available to rent on Facebook, as part of a service that the studio launched earlier this month. In addition to 'The Dark Knight,' users will now be able to rent 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,' 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,' 'Inception,' 'Life as We Know It' and 'Yogi Bear.' Each film can be rented for 48 hours using ...

Fans of 'The Dark Knight' can now rent the film on Facebook through a new program that Warner Bros. began testing today. Users who "like" the film's page can rent it for 30 Facebook credits ($3), giving them a 48-hour window to stream it. During that rental period, fans can leave comments on the movie, or pause and resume it as many times as they like, simply by logging into Facebook. Warner ...

Rather than investing $50 in a game without playing it first, gamers can now rent PC games online -- downloading the entire game to a hard drive, and paying $5 for five hours of initial playing time. According to Kotaku, when the first five hours is up, gamers can choose to continue playing by paying what's left of the game's retail price. If not, Direct2Drive, the company behind this online ...

It's no secret, or surprise, that subscription-based DVD rental services like Netflix are eating up the market share of retail outlets like Blockbuster. In the third quarter of 2010, subscription plans accounted for 41-percent of DVD rentals, while in-store transactions only accounted for 27-percent. What is slightly shocking is that, according to NPD, rental kiosks (like Redbox) outperformed ...

It hardly comes as a surprise, but the big news this morning was Blockbuster filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Under the arrangement, the failing video rental outlet would cut its debt from $1 billion to $100 million. Nothing is official, but it's expected that as many as 1,000 of the remaining 3,000 stores could be shuttered by year's end. ...

Taking a stance different from those of other film studios, Paramount Pictures recently decided to allow Redbox, a $1-DVD-rental kiosk, to distribute its films on the same day they go on sale in stores. According to the Los Angeles Times, Redbox will pay Paramount about $575 million as part of the revenue-sharing deal, which runs through 2014. Other studios, like Warner Bros., Universal Studios ...

Renting movies via YouTube is still a relatively new idea, but Google is hoping to expand its business (and lessen its reliance on advertising revenue) by allowing users to charge rental fees for uploaded videos. Hunter Walk, head of product management at YouTube, told MediaPost that the company was working on self-service video rentals for individual creators. This will offer yet another way ...

So you randomly get an invite, let's say, to the annual Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All of the taste-makers and most fashionable will be in attendance, including Queen Anna Wintour, herself. The problem: you make a mere $28K a year and your hottest ensemble comes straight from the clearance rack at Zara. What in the worst-dressed-list hell are you to do? (And, more ...

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Netflix_Watch_Instantly_coming_to_TiVo'; The TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD join the ranks of the Xbox 360, Roku and various Blu-ray players, with Netflix Watch Instantly streaming movies coming to several thousand households today in beta testing, followed by a wide release scheduled for "early December." There won't be any additional fees (other than ...

We fully understand that we're a few days late in posting this up, but seriously, we figured Netflix would have fixed whatever's been ailing its shipping system well before now. Days after we heard the first reports of users getting an atypical warning when viewing their queue alerting them of possible shipment delays, tips are still flowing in from frustrated users. The message asserts that ...

Even we would agree that digital downloads aren't apt to siphon away a significant amount of physical media market share in the immediate future, but a recent survey conducted by CinemaNow (read: your skeptic hat should now be firmly in place) suggests that the vast majority of Americans feel otherwise. As a matter of fact, 87% of those surveyed agreed that "renting DVDs at the video store or ...

Roku's Netflix Player got off to a hot start after launching just over a month ago, and apparently its creator has big plans for the plainly designed $99 box. According to a recent report over on Forbes, Tim Twerdahl, Roku's vice president of consumer products, has affirmed that a routine software update would be hitting later this year to enable content to be fetched and streamed from other ...