SANTA MONICA, Calif.–Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment is trying to develop and own the next iTunes–but for films.
“We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like (Apple Computer CEO Steve) Jobs did for music, but for the film industry,” Michael Arrieta, senior vice president of Sony Pictures, said at the Digital Hollywood conference here.
“I’m trying to create the new ‘anti-Napster,’” he added.
To that end, Arrieta said, his group plans to digitize Sony Pictures’ top 500 films and make them available for the first time in various digital environments within the next year. He said the distribution for films like “Spider-Man 2″ will go beyond just Movielink, the video-on-demand joint venture of Sony Pictures and several other major studios, which to date has hosted a limited library of Sony’s movies.
For example, Sony plans to sell and make films available in flash memory for mobile phones in the next year, Arrieta said. It also will further develop its digital stores for downloading and owning films on the PC, he said in an interview.
Sony’s plans–and similar moves by other studios–are likely to avoid empowering any one technology company–such as Apple in the music equation–and allow studios to pocket more of the profits. The philosophy in Hollywood is “Define your own agenda or someone else will for you.”
Equally important is trying to avoid the rampant digital theft in peer-to-peer communities that the music industry has suffered, media executives say.
At the Digital Hollywood conference–a three-day event that began Wednesday–media executives including Arrieta ruminated on ongoing hurdles to giving consumers access to unlimited films, TV shows and multimedia on a range of devices, anywhere at anytime.
They agreed that issues surrounding digital rights management, consumer adoption, and simple and compatible consumer electronics remained bottlenecks in the industry.
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