We're about to find out.
Say hello to M-Go, an ambitious new Burbank, California-based pay-per-view video service that's backed by Dreamworks Animation and the venerable TV technology company Technicolor. M-Go will lift the curtain on its ambitious plan to be a major player in digital video at a session Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
With Apple launching the iPhone 5 tomorrow a few blocks down the Street from the Intel event, M-Go's announcement is destined to get drowned out in the deafening media roar that will be coming from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. But make no mistake: this is a project worth watching.
M-Go CEO John Batter said in an interview with FORBES that the company intends to offer consumers easy access to top-tier on-demand video content on every potential device - and that in the long run they want to extend the model to other forms of content, including music and live television. The initial target is movies and television content, with a particular focus on new releases - an area where Netflix frankly has little to offer.
Batter says the company will offer content on a pay-per-view basis on a wide range of devices, including Android tablets and smartphones, Blu-Ray players, Intel processor-based Ultrabooks and various others. The service will be built in to Smart TVs, Blu-Ray players and WiFi tablets from both Samsung and Vizio.While M-Go is not planning to offer an Apple-specific app, Batter says Apple device users will be able to use the service via a Web browser.
The company has reached content licensing agreements with most of the major film studios, including NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. - all studios that support the UltraViolet digital video standard. (Notably missing is Disney, which does not support UltraViolet.)
Batter contends that M-Go will do more than simply match content available on other online video services. The service, he notes, will provide new tools to help consumers discover content that fits their preferences. Another feature on the site will point consumers to other services when users search for content that isn't available on M-Go. "If the title you want is not available in our library, we can tell you where it is available," he says.
Batter notes that Technicolor developed the back-end system used by LoveFilm, a European video service which is now owned by Amazon.com. He says the company, which now has about 100 people, was created about a year ago, building around the Technicolor team that build that software.
In Batter's view, Netflix has paved the wave for M-Go's service by training consumers to stream video. But he asserts that there is increasing disillusionment with the breadth of content offered on Netflix. He contends there is "low overall satisfaction with the service," due to the lack of first-run content and weak search and recommendation software. Batter says that "the wind is in our sales in terms of the movement of consumers from physical content to digital."
M-Go will allow consumers the option to rent or buy content; and it will offer titles in both standard def and high def. The company expects to have 6,000 titles by the service's launch in the fourth quarter; they expect to be at 10,000 by the end of the year, and to build rapidly into 2013.
Both Technicolor CEO Fred Rose and Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg are on M-Go's board of directors.
