Hey! I'm Karl Freeman currently a London based Freelance Flash Developer, Blogger & all round Web Enthusiast. Dabbling with AS3, Flex, Air & Processing to hopefully create awesome online and offline experiences.Get In Touch (Will be available again in July)
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Voddler, Swedish sofa streaming for films
Another swedish startup to off hit the ground running is Voddler, acclaimed to be the ‘Spotify for movies’. After finally coming out of hiding Voddler has been steadily opening the flood gates to its movie steaming service for around 3,000 lucky swedes a day. With most, including myself being Spotify advocates its hard not to like what Voddler is going to do for the movie industry. With a reputation as bad as theirs, its great to see that Voddler has wrangled them in to a new way of thinking.
Having recently signed on Disney and Paramount Voddler is on the way to becoming a game changing service for those desperately seeking to shun away the urges of piracy. Its primary business model like Spotify is ad supported but in a more cinema esq way. Whereby adverts are placed at the beginning of the movie to allow users to watch without interruptions.
Recently Voddler launched a pay per view option which lets its user’s to rent a movie for 5 Kroners ( 0.48p ) over 24 hours and has plans to offer a monthly subscriptions early next year. The combination of these options make it difficult to see how this isn’t going to be a success.
Although at a very young stage in development Voddler has been working in the backgrounds way before Spotify had become the poster boy for streaming digital content. Starting back in 2005, Voddler have been slowly brewing the service which will most likely spread like wildfire once they have fully established themselves out of beta and with plans to expand to Norway, Denmark and Finland its going to be great to see this gain more traction.
Being a brit I would like nothing more than for Voddler to launch over here next but as others have proved expansion is a pr disaster for services that can’t handle it and with Voddler being in the business of HD movies, I can’t see that being an easy task. Although I haven’t been able to test the service the concept alone has huge advantages over competing products which I can only assume is Blockbusters, LoveFilms and Sky+ in the UK. Needless to say Voddler is leading the way in the move for on demand entertainment delivered in a format consumers want.
** oh and imagine the extra offerings a service like this could do for you’re movie watching. Last.fm for films? Amazon esq automatic trailer downloads from your history? Rotten Tomato feedback integration? iPlayer local cache? etc…
