eeking to protect movies from the rampant online piracy that afflicts the music industry, five major film studios plan to begin offering today rental feature films that consumers can download from a Web site for a fee.

The service, called Movielink, will be the first to make a substantial number of popular Hollywood films available legally over the Internet. Industry executives say it is a significant step toward the long-promised bounty of video-on-demand, where anyone with an Internet connection can watch any movie ever made whenever they want.

Advertisement

But the joint venture faces many hurdles, not least of which is that most people like to watch movies on a television screen from a lounging position, not sitting up staring at a computer monitor. In addition, since the Movielink service was announced in August 2001, increasing numbers of cable and satellite television companies have begun providing video-on-demand services of their own.

Studio executives struck a cautious tone even as the service prepared to open its doors this week. "Our expectations are fairly modest," said Yair Landau, president of Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, who has championed the idea for more than a year. "This service does not transform the world, but it addresses a consumer demand that's out there."

Still, James B. Ramo, the chief executive of Movielink, said there were two main reasons to believe there is a market for the service. The first is that the company's research shows that movie trailers are the most-watched video material on the Web. The second is the popularity of Internet file-trading software like KaZaA and Morpheus, which people are already using to download unauthorized copies of movies in large numbers.

"Part of our job is to provide a legitimate outlet for people looking for video in the pirate community," Mr. Ramo said. "We consider the pirate services our competition."

Of the 15 million homes and 10 million dormitory rooms with broadband Internet connections, Mr. Ramo said, roughly one-third are believed to have residents interested in downloading video material. Travelers are another potential audience because Movielink customers can download films onto laptops and watch them on airplanes.

The site, movielink.com, is like a video store with more efficient search features. Consumers can view trailers of all the movies and create a "wish list" as they browse, then review the list on subsequent visits. Films cost $2.99 to $4.99 for 24 hours of viewing time, generally depending on how recent the film is.

For the studios, the key to the service is security technology supplied by Microsoft and RealNetworks. They hope that technology will prevent the movies from being copied and transferred freely over the Internet. It also allows them to set rules that govern how the movies can be viewed.

Movielink customers have 30 days to watch the films they download, after which the films will disappear from the hard drives. Once someone clicks "play" in the software provided by Movielink, that person has 24 hours to watch the movie. The film cannot be transferred to another device once it is downloaded to a computer.

About 175 movies will be available at first, including recent hits like "A Beautiful Mind" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," as well as older titles like "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Movielink says the films will take 20 minutes to four hours to download, depending on the speed of the customer's Internet connection. People with slower dial-up connections are discouraged from using the service.

The catalog is limited, at least for now, to films from the five studios that are partners in the service: MGM, Paramount Pictures, />Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures. Disney and 20th Century Fox considered beginning their own service but abandoned those plans after negative signals from antitrust regulators.

Movielink faces its own antitrust-related problems. A competing service, Intertainer, shut down in September and filed an antitrust lawsuit against Movielink and several of the studios. The suit says the studios began charging Intertainer more to license their movies once plans for Movielink were under way, in order to drive the company out of business.