Laptops see Starz

Cabler launches pic subscription service

By JOHN DEMPSEY

NEW YORK -- John Malone's Starz pay TV network has cut a deal with Real Networks that will funnel up to 100 movies a month to a laptop computer near you, starting in the spring.

The chairman and CEO of the Starz Encore Group John Sie will disclose the partnership today at a panel session during the Broadband Plus convention in Anaheim.

The significance of the partnership for Sie is that Starz becomes the first pay TV network to venture into what he calls subscription video-on-demand through Internet-broadband delivery.

To get these movies over the Internet for downloading, a customer will have to subscribe to the Starz Super Pak of a dozen movie networks on either a cable system or a satellite distributor. Subscribers must also have high-speed access to the Internet so that they won't grow old waiting for the movies to be downloaded.

With those two criteria met, the subscriber will then sign up with Real Networks and get the Starz package of movies, not through pay-per-view but for a monthly fee that's still not set. The bill to the customer could range from $6 to $9.95 a month. The lower figure would kick in if the subscriber were one of the 850,000 homes already paying $9.95 a month to receive a RealOne package of services that includes, among other things, news, sports and movie previews.

Larry Jacobson, president of Real Networks, said cable operators should be high on the Starz plan because, if it starts to make an impact in the marketplace, it will make subscribers more likely to get their high-speed access through cable modems, not through telephone digital-subscriber lines.

Sie said that more people are hooking up their computers to their TV sets, allowing them to watch downloaded movies on monitors larger than the screen of a PC. But the quality of the downloaded image has become sharper and sharper, said Jacobson, making it easy for people who travel a lot with their laptops to watch a movie on the PC screen.

Sie and Jacobson both stressed that for the foreseeable future, Internet video-on-demand will continue to be only a supplement to Starz's main business, which is to get cable and satellite subscribers to pay $10 a month for Starz and all of its multiplex channels .