Seagate and Paramount Team to Offer Pre-Loaded Movies on Portable HHDs

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For the first time, shoppers for additional disk-based storage will have a choice of buying portable drives already loaded with feature-length, DVD-quality movies.

Seagate, the world’s largest hard disk drive maker, and Viacom’s Paramount Pictures announced April 12 that they have come together to offer a total of 21 movies preloaded on 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go portable hard drives.
The movies all will be made available through the use of a key. One movie, “Star Trek” (2009) comes unlocked on the drive and is free with the purchase.

The other 20 movies, which range from popular comedies to dramas to movies for children, will be made available for a cost comparable to buying a DVD off the shelf — or $9.99 to $14.99 per film.
For example, other titles on the drive will include “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and “GI Joe.”

This arrangement, believed to be the first of its kind, is an example of the new methods of distribution that are being explored by movie-makers and their distributors.

“This is really an incremental distribution touch point for us,” Malik Ducard, Paramount Pictures senior vice president of Digital Distribution for the Americas, said. “It’s a specific customer, a specific demographic that we’re able to reach on an incremental basis.”

Several studios now partner with Netflix and Apple’s iTunes to provide movies for streaming or downloading from the Internet. Other video content producers are connected with Web companies such as YouTube, Hulu and others to offer movies and television shows as a hosted service.

The FreeAgent Go drive docks inside the Theater+ unit to enable a user to show the movie on a television or home movie screen.

The following are a list of films to be pre-loaded on the FreeAgent Go drives: