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Liberate, Signatures Eye Music VOD

Simon Applebaum
Multichannel News
10/8/2002 11:37:00 AM
Liberate Technologies is out to make music as a content provider.

The interactive-TV-software vendor unwrapped its first video-on-demand content play Tuesday morning at a media briefing in New York.

Liberate will partner with Signatures Network, an entertainment-licensing and event-merchandising firm, on a set of music services that can run in VOD or subscription-VOD settings. The idea is to give viewers the option to personalize their music TV by specific artists, genres, record labels or advertisers.

Service elements showcased at the briefing included concert performances, music videos, backstage clips, biographies/discographies, tour dates and at least one T-commerce feature, artist merchandise. All features are accessible through a special on-screen program guide.

Liberate will take its music-on-demand collaboration with Signature on a demo tour among cable and direct-broadcast satellite operators the next few weeks, out to land as many takers as possible for market trials early next year. The company's Web site (http://www.liberate.com/) is also presenting a VOD demo.

Liberate president Coleman Sisson said the venture would benefit the music and media industries simultaneously, with a new distribution system for musical content and more original on-demand fare for cable and DBS.

'Our technology supports a business model that provides the ideal solution to everyone involved,' he added in a prepared statement.

'It offers artists an unprecedented opportunity to commercialize their live performances while retaining creative oversight,' Signatures CEO Dell Furano said in his own statement, prepared in advance of appearing at Liberate's event, 'and it gives fans access to a limitless amount of great personalized content.'

Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Britney Spears, Shakira and U2 are among the artists connected in merchandising and/or marketing rights agreements with Signatures.

Separately, Liberate has more than 3,000 interactive-TV content/application providers worldwide in its PopTV developers program. Several PopTV representatives were scheduled to update their situations at the briefing.