LOS ANGELES -- Pittsburgh thinks it can one-up Hollywood.
Tiny Sightsound.com, hailing from the Steel City, is poised to begin renting and selling downloads of 65 full-length videos and films over the Internet -- from a feature starring Rosanna Arquette to extreme-sports videos.
The youth-oriented material, which includes a steamy Perfect 10 video, is aimed at college students who have access to PCs and high-speed Net connections, but not TVs and VCRs, said Sightsound chief executive Scott Sander.
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With rights to more than 1,100 films and videos, though, Sander plans to ramp up his product line quickly and attract other broadband users. He also hopes to convince some major Hollywood studios to rent and sell their products through his service.
"I want to be the Blockbuster of the Internet," Sander said.
He'll face a few obstacles before that happens.
"I would think the studios would prefer to [sell or rent movies themselves over the Internet] without relying on a gatekeeper," said a leading Los Angeles attorney whose clients include some of the industry's biggest players.
"The amounts of money at stake are so huge," said the attorney, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Studios don't want to give away their after-market revenue. And if I'm Disney, I really don't want to have 100,000 perfectly reproduced digital copies of my films flying around the world."
Studios developing their own plans for downloading music and movies to consumers over the Internet haven't decided whether to pay Sightsound.com licensing fees for that right or take the company to court, he added.
Sightsound.com has aggressively defended its ownership of key patents for downloading video and music -- demanding earlier this year, for example, that MP3.com pay 1 percent of its revenue to Sightsound.com as a licensing fee.
Sightsound's patented technology allows users to squeeze 100 gigabytes of recorded video into about 160 to 180 megabytes of computer hard drive space. But the long download times using conventional modems make the service impractical for most users, Sander said.
With a high-speed line, downloading a 60- to 90-minute video takes anywhere from three to 20 minutes, Sander said.
The videos are displayed at 30 frames per second, the same speed at which VCRs work. Sander says the viewing quality is comparable.
But will viewers want to watch features on their computers?
"For college students, that will always be an attractive option," Sander said. "They don't take their TVs to school any more. I think you could also see a world where people killing time at work perfect their golf swing watching Tiger Woods on a PC."
Sightsound.com will rent downloadable movies for US$1.99 to $3.49 for between one and five days, depending on the video. Consumers can also buy the products for $19.99.
Consumers who reach the end of their rental period receive a message on their screens asking whether they wish to extend their rental or buy the movie. If the material is shared with another computer user -- an easy matter even if the recipient has a 56k modem -- the message will automatically pop up on the new computer, too.
Sander says that he doesn't expect to have the same problems protecting his material that music companies have had with digital downloads.
He's convinced that improvements in encryption technology in Microsoft's latest version of its Windows Media Player and the threat of five years in jail and a $250,000 fine for stealing intellectual property will put off would-be bootleggers.
"Motion pictures are fundamentally different than music," Sander said. "The cost of making [CDs] is actually quite small. There aren't enough traffic cops to give out the tickets. The average cost of making a feature film in the United States is $52.7 million.
"If you steal that, let me tell you, those people get pissed."
