Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), General Electric (GE), Time Warner (TWX), Marketing and advertising, Walt Disney (DIS), Viacom (VIA), Sony Corp ADR (SNE)

Lions Gate (NYSE: LGF), the feisty little studio that is responsible for torture-porn franchises Saw and Hostel, has hooked up with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to see if consumers care about owning digital copies of the movies they buy on DVD and Blu-ray format.

According to the following press release, Lionsgate will include an iTunes digital version of select projects on certain home-video releases. The digital copy will allow users to transfer a movie to an iTunes account, so it could then be viewable on multiple devices like PCs or Macs, iPods, Apple TV and iPhones. First up for the iTunes digital treatment will be Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo — yes, the old soldier is still around — to be released to home video in May.

As the studio makes clear in its press release, this is all about experimentation with the promotion of new distribution models. Lionsgate wants to efficiently, and effectively, create new opportunities for its library. It’s not alone — Disney (NYSE: DIS), Viacom (NYSE: VIA), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Sony (NYSE: SNE) and General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) NBC Universal asset are all on a never-ending study of how best to leverage the digital era to make money from content portfolios. Lionsgate wants DVD buyers to realize that they can use iTunes to buy movies from its catalog. It’s a bit weird to me, though, since one would figure that a person who buys a DVD will probably just access that particular content from the DVD itself. I understand the value of transferability, of course, but if Lionsgate — or any content provider, for that matter — simply ensures that each digital product sold online contains unique, compelling extras that cannot be found in any other format, then a digital library will be that much easier to monetize.

At any rate, it will be interesting to see how Apple and Lionsgate do with this scheme. Apple and its iTunes brand are certainly powerful drivers of digital distribution, so maybe users will perceive a value from the digital copies.

Disclosure: Steven Mallas owns shares of Disney and General Electric; positions can change at any time.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Marketing and Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.