Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Studios back VOD system ZillionTV


DVD, DVR and VOD are old school. Now meet ZillionTV. The Sunnyvale startup company, backed by several major studios, is set to introduce Wednesday an ad-supported VOD system in which commercials are tailored to viewers who can't fast-forward through them.

ZillionTV allows viewers to choose the categories of advertising that is most interesting to them, and commercials fitting the bill are inserted into TV shows and movies that are streamed via broadband onto TV screens.

Content comes from Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, NBC Universal, 20th Century Fox Television and Disney, all of which are equity stakeholders in the new company. Forty other partners also supply content, and discussions are under way with Viacom and CBS.

ZillionTV operates through a device it calls ZBar that it supplies for free, though to make it work users must pay a one-time activation fee of up to $100, said CEO Mitch Berman, a TV industry veteran who helped found E!

ZillionTV won't launch to consumers until the fourth quarter, when such TV shows as 30 ROCK and SMALLVILLE and movies like The Dark Knight will be available on demand. By year's end, ZillionTV will have rights to 15,000 titles, Berman said.

Users maneuver through the ZillionTV interface with a motion-sensing remote similar to a Nintendo Wii controller. "The whole screen on your TV becomes interactive," Berman said.

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