Fox Studios’ films are among the most popular movies coming out of Hollywood these days, and by partnering with Ericsson and Telstra, they want to pre-load select movies on phones and allow customers to rent or buy them. Pre-loading a movie or two on a device as a buyer’s bonus is nothing new and has been around since the Galaxy S days, but Fox’s trial offer which will soon go live for a month-long pilot program pre-loads movies onto a device, notifies a user when new ones are available, and allows them to pay to watch the movies both online and offline in the best possible quality.
As part of the pilot program, an unspecified number of Telstra customers will be given devices with a special trial app which preloads movies onto a device in 1080p resolution. The whole thing will be pulled off using a tripartite of Ericsson’s proprietary technologies. Their MediaFirst cloud platform will deliver the films from the source, their Unified Delivery Network will take care of getting the movies to users, and their MediaFirst TV platform will power the app that consumers will use to actually get the movies. Ericsson touts the entire thing as being highly secure, with multiple levels of DRM and watermarking to protect the films that end up on a user’s device from being played on other devices or ripped for sharing.
The platform is supposed to not affect the processing and network performance of a device and will not eat into customers’ data plans. This likely means that movies will be stored on a separate partition from system files to avoid the slowdown often seen while moving files around, and they will likely download slowly in the background, either only on Wi-Fi, or zero-rated on Telstra’s network. Users will be notified when new movies are available and will be able to make a payment to view them instantly regardless of whether they have a network connection. The possible compromises regarding device storage space, network performance, and even device performance are quite high, but Ericsson is confident that such pitfalls have been avoided with this solution.