Flixster could be about to get a whole lot more useful, if plans to allow users to upload their DVD collections so they can stream them from wherever they happen to be come off.
The Time-Warner owned movie listings site aims to provide a kind of Google Music for movies service, using the cloud to store movies digitally.
Time Warner CFO John Martin told investors that users will be able to "upload your existing physical DVDs, have the ability access them across multiple devices anywhere you want, have the ability to manage your collections with social aspects as well, go in, have friends see what movie collections they have, (and) see who has been watching those films."
To the cloud!
This could be big news for tablet owners, who won't need to sacrifice valuable and limited storage space on their devices in order to watch an abundance of their own movies.
But there's no word on what this service will cost; a movie is going to be about a 700MB to 1GB a go, so to have a substantial number of them stored in the cloud is going to require quite a bit of storage.
Then there's the issue of how to copy the DVDs in the first place, a notoriously tricky and legally shady process. Whether or not Time-Warner's plans for Flixster include an iTunes-style DVD-ripping interface remains to be seen, but if so then movie execs will probably have a thing or two to say about making it easier for consumers to copy DVDs.
While it sounds like a brilliant idea for Flixster and movie fans, Time-Warner is likely to have a rocky road ahead.
From Deadline
