Lions Gate tests waters of delivering films to handheld PC products. (Media & Technology).Can hordes of teen-age video garners be converted into mobile moviegoers paying $39.95 a pop? Pocket PC Films Inc. thinks so. Hollywood, for the most part, isn't counting on it. The L.A.-based company, founded last year as a new media unit of video distributor Tunein Entertainment Inc., has been selling content for hand-held devices, including movies, business training and self-improvement videos. Last week, the company said it was entering a new frontier New Frontier President John F. Kennedy’s legislative program, encompassing such areas as civil rights, the economy, and foreign relations. [Am. Hist.: WB, K:212] See : Aid, Governmental : providing videos that can be used on the popular Game Boy device made by Nintendo of America Inc. So far, the only studio that has agreed to provide content for Pocket PC is Lions Gate Entertainment
"The cost of memory is sliding, and we already meet the studios' performance expectations because the video is VHS (Video Home System) A half-inch, analog videocassette recorder (VCR) format introduced by JVC in 1976 to compete with Sony's Betamax, introduced a year earlier. quality," said Darrell Griffin Darrell Griffin is a rugby league player with Huddersfield Giants, and an England international. His former clubs include Oxford Cavaliers, London Broncos and Wakefield Trinity Wildcats. He is notable as being a top flight rugby league player from a non-traditional area. , president of Pocket PC Films. Griffin said the company is in talks with several other Hollywood studios. Pocket PC Films also plans to line up deals with major video rental chains so it can rent its software alongside Game Boy games in stores. There is some evidence of a market for watching movies on the fly. Portable DVD players A handheld device with a built-in DVD drive and flip-over lid that contains a screen, typically 6" to 10" in size. It may support rear seat passenger viewing, in which case the unit is hung upside down from the back of the front seat head rest, and a switch flips screen content 180 have become popular both as part of laptops and as stand-alone devices. However, analysts said Game Boy users are unlikely to be interested in non-interactive content. Griffin admitted that Nintendo has yet to show any interest, and that he is focused on offering more games to build closer ties to the company. "Success in mobile depends on how much the software sells for and if Hollywood gets behind it," said Sean Badding, senior analyst at the Carmel Group, a media research firm. "Lions Gate is a litmus test litmus test n. A test for chemical acidity or basicity using litmus paper. for other studios in this new distribution medium." Even Lions Gate appears to be hedging its bets. Only a few of its movies, along with some children's programming from Tunein's library, will ship this summer. Lions Gate, which has a majority stake in Internet video-on-demand provider Cinema Now Inc., declined comment. The lack of industry support will be a big hurdle for Pocket PC Films. Compared with DVD DVD: see digital versatile disc. DVD in full digital video disc or digital versatile disc Type of optical disc. The DVD represents the second generation of compact-disc (CD) technology. movies, the cost is double and the viewing screen is tiny. "This is a huge compromise in overall experience and users are being asked to pay a premium," said Seamus McAteer, senior analyst at Zelos Group, which tracks the mobile gaming industry. Pocket PC Film's Game Boy software comes in the form of a removable disk A disk or disk cartridge that is inserted into the drive for reading and writing and removed when not required. Using optical technologies, CDs and DVDs are the most common examples. called a SD card. Having to go out and buy another kind of storage media for content is another deterrent, said McAteer. But the company says the decreasing price of SD cards will help drive industry acceptance of the product, just as happened with DVDs. |
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