December 05, 2011

Netflix and Lovefilm on TiVo? Maybe...

The Competition Commission's is getting its recommendation on breaking BSkyB's hollywood movie dominance, and maybe this could lead to Virgin Media getting perhap Netflix or Lovefilm services (via TiVo?) on Virgin Media, too. No-one knows for certain how the movie services will play out in the long term, but here's how Paid Content is speculating on this:
BSkyB’s set-top boxes may have to offer services like Netflix, Lovefilm and Blinkbox alongside its own Sky Movies, under new proposals from the Competition Commission.
That is one of two new remedies proposed by the commission, which this summer provisionally ruled that Sky’s exclusive deals with six Hollywood studios is anti-competitive.
In an additional new consultation, the commission is asking…
  • “whether access to Sky’s Ethernet-enabled STBs would enable qualifying OTT movie service providers to compete more effectively with Sky’s movies services”
  • or “whether, in the foreseeable future, this remedy will be rendered superfluous through technical and market developments, in particular the adoption by consumers of Internet-enabled TVs and STBs, including YouView”.
Sky has only recently enabled its own on-board on-demand service, Anytime+, which includes movies, on its boxes. It is also increasingly making its own content available on other devices and platforms including YouView, for which it is a content partner, when it launches next year.
A compulsion to host rival services on its own box would be a massive boon to rival services like Netflix, Lovefilm and Blinkbox because Sky is in around 10.5 million UK homes.
But the notion is likely be contested vigorously by Sky. In any case, the technical challenge could be considerable since Sky’s current Sky+ box was not built to host over-the-top services

1 comment:

Anthony said...

When the iPad app finally gets released ...

I wonder if there will be an option for us to watch streamed content on our iPads too?