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This may or may not turn into a good thing (R):

Actor Morgan Freeman and chipmaking giant Intel Corp. are teaming up on a new venture to distribute premium movies to consumers over the Internet before the films become available on DVD.

Freeman and Intel executives announced the new digital entertainment company Wednesday at an annual retreat for chief executives of top media companies in this mountain resort.
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Hollywood has been reluctant to offer digitized movies directly to consumers over the Internet, fearful of suffering a similar fate as the music industry, which has been hit hard hit by piracy enabled by file-swapping services.

Freeman said his deal with Intel should avoid those pitfalls by giving customers a ``simple, easy and attractive'' alternative to piracy.

``We're going to bypass what the music industry had to come up with, and that's to get ahead of the whole piracy thing,'' Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press.

Few other concrete details were provided by Freeman and Intel officials about the company. However, they did say that ClickStar will be led by former Sony Pictures executive Nizar Allibhoy.

The devil will be in those missing concrete details.

They do have an opportunity to get it right and I, for one, look ahead to the day when it will be easy (read: I don't have to drive to the rental store or wait for the Netflix envelope to arrive) to see a movie when I want. The price will need to be somewhere close to and ultimately less than the rental price and should allow 2-3 viewings. As I will want excellent quality I'll also want my ISP connection enhanced...my current Comcast connection will not cut it and will need a simple way to deliver it from my hard drive to my future huge wall mounted plasma screen.

Posted by Steve on July 6, 2005