Exciting news for anyone on a budget with time to kill: On April 30, AOL will launch a new online channel that will allow you to watch...
Exciting news for anyone on a budget with time to kill: On April 30, AOL will launch a new online channel that will allow you to watch a selection of movies for free across a range of different devices, no subscription required. All you have to do is sit through a smattering of commercials.
As Variety reports, AOL will make “tens of films” available to watch with commercial interruptions, with a rotating selection each month. This new “Movies” channel of the AOL On Network will feature titles from the production company Miramax. Miramax is responsible for more than 700 films, including Chicago, Good Will Hunting, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Pulp Fiction, and Life Is Beautiful.
No word on what the premiere lineup will be quite yet, or whether those movies will be included. Fingers crossed!
AOL On is available both as a website and as a free app on various devices, including the Roku, iPad and Amazon’s Fire TV. Current content includes short clips from AOL sites like The Huffington Post and Engadget, as well as original shows produced by AOL itself.
Though a lot of Miramax’s films are licensed to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, those companies almost all require you to pay a monthly subscription fee. By instead asking viewers to watch commercials in exchange for free content, AOL just might win the hearts of cheap Americans everywhere.
Sony is trying something similar with its Crackle website and app, which also streams movies and classic television shows for free with commercials.
It’s unclear what form the commercials on AOL’s product will take. Will they be long, interactive ads that require our participation? Or will the movie be spliced up into bits, separated by a short, two-minute sponsored message here and there? Ran Harnevo, the president of AOL Video, would only promise Variety that “we are going to respect consumption behaviors and we won’t get too aggressive on monetization.”
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