Fox tests auto-downloading movies onto your phone
Which you'll then pay to unlock for offline playback.
Wouldn't you like it if newish movies trickle-downloaded onto your phone when you weren't looking so you could watch them later? That's the concept behind an experiment being carried out by 20th Century Fox over the next month. The studio has partnered with Australian mobile network Telstra and Ericsson to test a mobile app that quietly pulls down flicks for watching, offline, later on. Assuming, at least, that you pay the requisite fee to unlock the film that's quietly occupying space on your smartphone.
The theoretical system would work by gently downloading movies onto devices in the background, with users paying a fee to unlock them. It appears as if the content would be pushed over Telstra's LTE-B network (for video broadcasting) at no charge to the consumer. After all, you're going to be paying for the movie, packed within a very tight DRM wrapper, so it would seem churlish to make you pay for its delivery as well.
According to The Verge, the experiment won't use the network at all; instead testers are being handed a Galaxy S7 with all the films pre-loaded. So far, only a handful of titles are being offered, including The Martian, Deadpool and The Revenant. But the idea is that eventually there will be a broad catalog of titles that will filter onto your device automatically, based on your movie-watching preferences. You know, like TiVo Suggestions, only with more buzzwords.
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