Movie channel to go live on Web before TV debut

A premium movie channel backed by a trio of studios is expected to debut as an on-demand Web site months before its traditional TV launch.

The consortium of MGM, Paramount Pictures, and Lions Gate announced Tuesday at the NATPE television conference in Las Vegas that the channel will be called Epix (pronounced like the plural of epic) and feature more than 15,000 movies from the three studios. The new channel is expected to launch as a subscription-only Web site in May that will stream its content on the Internet--five months before its planned TV launch in October.

The Epix movie channel is expected to launch with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," among others.

(Credit: Paramount Pictures)

The new channel, which is intended to compete with HBO and Showtime, will feature such hits as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Iron Man, and other movies from the studios' libraries. The channel is also expected to produce original programming and present live concert performances, as other premium channels do.

However, as Mark Greenberg, chief executive of the joint venture dubbed Studio 3 Networks told The Wall Street Journal, the Web streaming service is "not our primary business model."

The joint venture apparently formed last year after negotiations fell through with CBS' Showtime network. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) But perhaps most notable is the fact that the joint venture has yet to land any distribution deals with cable or satellite TV providers. "Those are coming," The New York Times quoted Greenberg as saying at the television conference.

[aMUSICsite]

Let me guess US only service?

[pjhenry1216]

Monthly fee for the web service or is it going to be pay-per-view? And what kinda prices are we talking about here?

[stevenmusil]

No pricing specifics have been released -- hey, they just got around to announcing a name for the service. But keep in mind that the Web platform isn't their focus; the real money is in distribution deals. Showtime's expired movie deal with Paramount netted the studio about $100 million a year.

[duggerdm]

Talk about a detail-less, insufficiently researched and prematurely written article. So much more could have been said.

Even more obvious in the articles content vacuum was its' failure to mention the impact of one more better service available on the Web and one less on commercial drowned cable TV. Just another indication of the inflexibility of TV programmers and one more nail in the coffin of traditional commercial ridden TV and expensive Premium channels with very Old Movie channel TV programming.

Web entertainment is rapidly moving out of its' infancy thanks to retarded TV programming. TV and its' failure to monitor consumer attitudes regarding commercial frequency, redundancy and duration is becoming the posture child of business model dinosaurs. You would think TIVO's success - just its' existence might have been a sufficient message regarding the excessive commercial over burden of TV programming. Greed associated with poor service seems so dependable at doing itself in.

[dadsgravy]

Cheap and Angry. You ever thought about seeing someone? Maybe once a week or so. Entertainment is a luxury, not a right. The more you spend, the better the experience.

So if you set an unlimited budget on Tv, internet, books and music, You'd be better educated, happier and feel a greater sense of connection. That is, if you weren't dumb enough to let a house, a car, a marriage and a few kids suck your soul out.