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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

A couple of lines in a settings file does not a partnership make, but some enterprising hackers at the Archos Community Forums have discovered evidence that Archos is planning at least one large-scale content deal when the super-hot 605 launches in the US. Poking around in the unit’s provider.xml file inside the system folder, user Plissken007 discovered pointers to not one, but eight major content partners for wireless media distribution, including some with live holder pages on the Archos website. Notables include Best Buy, Cicuit City, Amazon (for Unbox, probably), MovieLink, Vongo, AOL, and, of course, YouTube. Now, we can’t see Best Buy and Circuit City sharing space like this, so Archos is probably hedging their bets a little, but if it’s true, it looks like there’s finally going to be a major competitor to Apple’s iPod / iTunes ecosystem out there, eh?

[Disclosure: AOL owns Engadget’s parent company.]

[Via Archos Fans]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Source: Nilay Patel

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

A couple of lines in a settings file does not a partnership make, but some enterprising hackers at the Archos Community Forums have discovered evidence that Archos is planning at least one large-scale content deal when the super-hot 605 launches in the US. Poking around in the unit’s provider.xml file inside the system folder, user Plissken007 discovered pointers to not one, but eight major content partners for wireless media distribution, including some with live holder pages on the Archos website. Notables include Best Buy, Cicuit City, Amazon (for Unbox, probably), MovieLink, Vongo, AOL, and, of course, YouTube. Now, we can’t see Best Buy and Circuit City sharing space like this, so Archos is probably hedging their bets a little, but if it’s true, it looks like there’s finally going to be a major competitor to Apple’s iPod / iTunes ecosystem out there, eh?

[Disclosure: AOL owns Engadget’s parent company.]

[Via Archos Fans]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Source: Nilay Patel

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Blockbuster announced the acquisition of movie download site Movielink this evening. The price is not being disclosed (meaning it isn’t “material” to Blockbuster’s shareholders), although the Wall Street Journal says it was less than $20 million.

Movielink was created in 2002 as a joint venture of most of the big studios - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios. $100 million or so was spent building the company.

That’s $80 million in losses for the studio investors on their Movielink project, which is money that could have been invested in more productive things. Like suing their customers.

This is clearly a hedge move by Blockbuster, which is locked in a death spiral with the cheaper and more convenient Netflix. Netflix also launched an awesome free movie on demand product earlier this year (and are using much of their operating profits to fund it). Until now, Blockbuster had no answer.

But Movielink certainly isn’t going to be a silver bullet for Blockbuster. We looked at all of the players in Movielink’s space last October. Their competitors include, besides Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, CinemaNow and Guba (and, let’s be honest, BitTorrent). Movielink has a very deep library of movies, but they are DRM’d to the hilt and the studios force them to price downloads at higher-than-dvd prices.

Blockbuster’s salad days ended in 2002, and the stock has slid steadily since then. It is no longer profitable. There are just too many options for consumers who want to watch movies at home. The company’s biggest asset, and biggest problem, are the long term leases it has on its 9,000 retail stores. It needs to defocus on Netflix and think about how to use those stores to its advantage. Otherwise, its long term prognosis is clear - deadpool.
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Source: Michael Arrington

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

We heard it was going to happen, and it did: Blockbuster bought Movielink for an undisclosed sum, surely to compliment its online offerings to better compete with arch-nemesis Netflix in the internet movie distribution game. And surely if it did sell for the piddly $50 mil figure being tossed around before, the barrier to this entry is just a drop in the bucket for the big blue movie rental giant.

[Thanks, Philip]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Source: Ryan Block

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