This summer, a new online initiative by 20th Century Fox may help prove whether high-bandwidth marketing on the Internet really helps put butts in seats. If it does, broadband channels may be the movie studios’ killer app for the Internet. And if not, "de-install" is just a click away.
Download the broadband app at www.kingdomofheaven.com/broadband/index.html and you’ll be transported to the Holy Land in the 12th Century. While you’re there, you can watch a high-res trailer of the new Ridley Scott film, browse DVD-like extras and send your friends links to your favorite shots. Welcome to the new world of Internet broadband channels, which 20th Century Fox launched May 2 with Kingdom of Heaven— followed by Mr. And Mrs. Smith in June, Fantastic Four in July, and two more to be determined.
Fox hopes the channels will prove to be a powerful marketing tool as Web surfers click through to other Internet channels, pass along sites to their friends, and, in the process, aid in the collection of all-important cyber metrics. Once each movie opens, visitors can view theater schedules and buy tickets, sign up for upcoming titles, and receive email postcards with images from these movies and hyperlinks to the sites.
Fox’s leap into cyberspace didn’t come out of the blue. The studio tested the waters in 2003, when it built an Internet channel for Master and Commander. Two years later, the U.S. has an estimated 35 million broadband users, and new technology makes the applications more dynamic and reliable. For video delivery, Fox partnered with Maven Networks, a three-year-old Cambridge, MA company. The trick, says Maven Networks creative director Rebecca Paoletti, is not simply encoding— they start with a high-quality video source and encode at an average bit rate of 1 Mbps at 640x480 resolution (HD video is encoded at 5 or 6 megs per second). "But anyone can encode high-quality video," notes Paoletti. "It’s the delivery and managing of the files that makes us different. All the other applications stream video. What we do is push the video to the user’s desktop, which means they play off the desktop, with none of the jerkiness of streamed video."
In addition, Maven Networks’ application overlays the video with a browser, which lets users do pretty much anything they can do in a Web site. (A patent is pending for this "dynamic overlays" technology.) Maven Networks’ technology partner is Akamai, whose on-demand distributed computing platform comprises more than 14,000 servers on 1100 networks in more than 65 countries.
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