Huge legal holiday downloads at Telstra's BigPond Movies

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 21 July 2011 15:37

Your IT - Entertainment

Record holiday downloads at Telstra's BigPond Movies: despite piracy, people really are willing to pay to legally and conveniently download video content, with record numbers great evidence of that!

With the success of legal video download and streaming sites around the world, and Telstra's mass of legal movie downloaders alongside other legal streaming services in Australia, people are clearly happy to pay for content.

Illegal downloading still has its adherents, and is said to dwarf legal downloading by leaps and bounds, but legal downloads grow through convenience, cheap enough pricing (which could always be keener from a consumer's point of view), ever wider availability across multiple devices and competition between legal content providers.

Given that Telsta's pricing starts at AUD $3.99, with new releases at $5.99, it's clearly more than a dollar or two, but is still inexpensive enough for plenty of people not to bother with piracy, especially when Telstra's BigPond Movies is available across a range of devices including TVs, in competition with stores and ecosystems like Apple's iTunes and its iDevices.

Although Telstra seems to have forgotten to mention that BigPond Movies can also be watched on your computer, laptop or either of those two devices plugged into your flat-screen TV, although it does direct you to its BigPondMovies.com website where you can see that you can do just that.

Telstra does, however, remind us that 'BigPond Movies can be accessed via the Telstra T-Box, LG or Samsung TV's and certain blu-ray players', which is where a lot of people will be more naturally able to easily access the service.

Telstra's T-Box is affordable enough and actually lets you record, pause and rewind live TV, so coupled with the legal movie download service on what would be an unmetered BigPond connection, it's natural to see the service being actively used.

The fact that BigPond Movies can also be access via smart Blu-Ray players and some of LG and Samsung's smart TVs is also a great strategy to fight back against iTunes dominating the global market for digital content sales and rentals.

So, what movies were hot during the holiday season?

Telstra's announcement uncovers the unsurprising fact that 'animation and family movies have driven a two week school holiday record for BigPond Movie downloads'.

The Telstra Executive Director in charge of Media, J-B Rousselot said: 'We achieved our biggest ever two week school holidays for BigPond Movies with more than 120,000 movies downloaded and had close to 13,000 movie downloads via the T-Box in one day.'

Continued on page two, please read on!