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"HBO was a middleman that took a huge slice of the pie out of the pay movie business, and they see us as a budding HBO," said Jonathan Taplin, Intertainer's chief executive. "They don't want an intermediary, and that's not good for consumers."

In another lawsuit, Sonicblue, the maker of the ReplayTV digital video recorder, is also seeking to prove that the studios abused their market power by freezing Intertainer out of the Internet movie download business. If the studios are found to have misused their rights as copyright holders, a Sonicblue lawyer said, they would be barred from enforcing their copyright infringement claims against Sonicblue, whose Replay machine allows consumers to record television programs and to skip over advertising.

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Studio executives say Intertainer simply spent too much on technology and did not have enough money to pay for the movies it needed to make the service a success. Movielink is not expected to make money for several years.

Company officials emphasized that each studio set its own pricing and decided which movies to put on the service: "Our whole approach here is to help drive a new pro-competitive channel of distribution," Mr. Ramo of Movielink said.

The Justice Department's antitrust division is also investigating the service. But any regulatory battles are likely to be overshadowed by market pressures, at least for the next few months. Movielink, which took far longer than expected to come together, is opening its doors at a time when cable and satellite companies are aggressively promoting their own video-on-demand systems.

For the moment, the studios are releasing films on Movielink only after they have been in video stores for several months, at the same time as they become available for pay-per-view on cable. But that may change as the studios experiment with video-on-demand as a substitute for less lucrative rentals.

Warren Lieberfarb, president of home video for Warner Bros., would like to sell permanent copies of movies over the Movielink service, something that would take the place of purchasing DVD's for some consumers.

"The movie industry has faced media revolutions vastly more opportunistically than our brothers in the music business," Mr. Lieberfarb said. "We're offering consumers another convenient way to get movies, and we think the pie is just going to get bigger."