KOCH Ent. takes on EZTakes to sell 'Download-to-Own' DVDs

KOCH Entertainment, a leading fast growing independent US music & video company has selected EZTakes to provide a movie download service.  EZTake has been the world's first movie download service to allow its movies to be written to DVD for playback in standard DVD players.  The big advantage with this over many other competing video-on-demand services is that consumers are not forced to watch their downloaded movie on their PC.  The other advantage of having it on DVD is the same as with a store-bought disc:  The consumer may play their movie in virtually any DVD player.

The
EZTake service provides an online catalogue of several hundred independent full-length film titles covering a wide range of genres, including Bollywood, cult, horror and classics.  According to EZTake's CEO Jim Flynn, the purpose of their service is to give the consumers what they want, such as the ability watch movies on their TV.  However, unlike store bought DVDs, this service uses a much stronger anti-piracy measure by tagging each recorded DVD with the customer's identity and an embedded ID number in the title.  This means that should someone attempt to illegally redistribute copies of the title, every copy can be traced back to the person who bought the title.

EZTakes, the world's first legal DVD movie download service, announced today that KOCH Entertainment, an independent film distributor and the fifth largest music label, has begun selling a catalog of movies on the EZTakes Web site at http://www.eztakes.com. Consumers can now purchase, download and own these films. Because EZTakes makes it easy to burn DVDs, consumers can watch movie downloads almost anywhere. EZTakes has already added some of the KOCH titles to its growing catalog. Since early 2006, the EZTakes site has been offering hundreds of full-length independent films of all genres, as well as classics, cult, horror and Bollywood movies. "We believe that EZTakes' consumer-friendly model makes it very attractive to paying customers," said Michael Rosenberg, President of KOCH Entertainment Distribution. Rosenberg continued, "Giving people the ability to easily burn downloads to DVDs that will play in their living rooms provides the kind of value and convenience that consumers are willing to pay for."

It is really nice to see a movie download service that
allows DVD writing, especially since this does away with the risk of the movie
not being able to authorise its DRM due to an Internet connection issue,
downtime or even the fear of the company going out of business.  Then
again, chances are that not all consumers would be happy having their identity
being written to DVD.  For the average consumer, this would unlikely
be an issue, but if one gives a copy to a friend, who in-turn makes a copy or
shares it over P2P, it could turn out to be bad news for the person who bought
the title.  The same goes with the lightweight DRM which watermarks music with the customer's identity instead of crippling it with restrictions.

Feel free to discuss about movie download services on our forum.

Source: Yahoo Financial News