Hey Presto! It’s Foxtel with a difference

Pay TV service provider Foxtel has announced plans for an Internet delivered movie streaming and movies-on-demand service that will put it in head to head competition with Quickflix, which has been struggling to turn a profit from this market for several years.

The Foxtel service, dubbed Presto, will offer live and on demand access to Foxtel’s most popular movie content for $24.99 per month, without any lock-in contract. It will be available to anyone in Australia with a compatible Mac or PC and a sufficiently high speed broadband connection. It will also be available on tablets running Apple iOS or Android.

Subscribers will have access to all seven live Foxtel Movies channels: Foxtel Movies Premiere, Foxtel Movies Comedy, Foxtel Movies Drama/Romance, Foxtel Movies Thriller/Crime, Foxtel Movies Action/Adventure, Foxtel Movies Family and Foxtel Movies Masterpiece.

Foxtel CEO, Richard Freudenstein, said the move was aimed at leveraging Foxtel’s assets to enable it to capture a healthy share of the growing digital market. “We are already investing in content, platforms and experiences to delight movie-loving customers so it makes sense that we launch Presto as part of our digital media content strategy,” he said.

“Australians are hungry for different ways to experience great entertainment when they want and how they want. The launch of Presto as a second brand allows us to meet the needs of different customer segments more effectively and is another way Foxtel is continuing to make its content more accessible.”

According to a report in The Australian, free to air channels Seven, Nine and Ten are all planning to launch similar services later this year. Eugene Razbash, CEO of CombiTel, said “On demand services provided by broadcasters are expected to be delivered under the HbbTV umbrella; using MPEG-DASH as the delivery format, we will also see other services make use of the format.”

The paper said that Nine, presently owned by hedge funds Apollo and Oakten, was looking to float on the ASX later this year and viewed the launch of such a service as something that would make its stock more attractive to investors. “Nine is under significant pressure to prove in the prospectus for the float that it has the capacity to lift revenues at a time when the ad market is being stalled by structural change,” The Australian said.

Australian startup Quickflix - which started life offering rental DVDs by mail- has been struggling to build its online movie business for several years and came close to going broke in 2012. The company recently boasted that it had achieved “a new record of over 1,700 new signups in single day.” It is hoping to become cashflow positive in the next six months.