BT Vision adds HD rental service

17th September 2008

 

BT Vision has announced that it will be launching an HD film rental service for its customers from the BT Vision website, with films in the 1080i HD format being available from a starting price of £2.95, increasing to £4.95 for brand new titles.

However, users would be advised to put the kettle before making themselves comfortable and pressing the play button. Films on the BT Vision rental service will be downloaded rather than streamed, and with HDTV typically using a bit rate of at least 10 Mbps, and usually much more than that, a 1 hour 40 minutes long film would take about 5 and a half hours to download on a 3 Mbps broadband connection. But at least the 7.5 GB file size won't count towards the amount of data a user has downloaded (you have to be a BT subscriber to be on BT Vision).

Five hours is still a lot quicker than the postal DVD rental services, but this kind of service will only really come into its own once people have superfast broadband connection speeds, because downloading at 40 Mbps (which is the speed that BT has said users would see on superfast broadband using FTTC) would cut the download time down to around 25 minutes, assuming a download speed of 40 Mbps could be sustained. This service is for BT Vision customers, though, and BT does have more control over the download speeds and the quality of service (QoS) than on the open Internet, so it should be possible for BT to provide high download speeds.

The first titles to be available on the HD rental service will be The Other Boleyn Girl, The Hulk, and Babe.

 

 


 

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