About Headweb

Company

Headweb was founded in 2006 by Swedish serial entrepreneurs within the media and online games industry. The company is independently operated by a dedicated management team with offices in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden.

Mission

Headweb's mission is to become the market leader in providing premium video content to people when, where and how they want it.

Overview

Headweb is an online video service that offers movies, TV shows, concerts and other video clips at Headweb.com and other destination websites.

Content

Headweb has a large selection of videos and movies from more than 35 content providers, including, Folkets Bio, Klubb Super 8, Noble Entertainment, NonStop Entertainment, Pan Vision, Sandrew Metronome and Vanguard Cinemas. Users can currently choose from more than 1500 movies which includes classics such as 8 ½, Requiem for a dream, Pan's Labyrinth and new releases such as 1408, Rambo and Hell Ride.

User experience

Headweb strives to create the best online movie experience for its users and focuses on three key areas.

Quality and convenience

Headweb is accessible from any computer connected to the Internet. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
Headweb allows users to find and watch old classics and new releases in DVD quality either by downloading the movies or by streaming them – at home or on the road.

Easy to use

Headweb is easy to use. Free movies and rentals are available directly at www.headweb.com. Just click on a video to watch right away. Only requires a Flash 9.0 enabled computer.

To download a movie requires a small software which helps with downloading and playback of movies. It even allows to burn some movies to DVD. Of course playback isn't limited to the Headweb software – playback works with any regular DVD Player software such as PowerDVD, WinDVD or VLC. If you burn a movie to DVD it will work on any regular DVD player.

Legal

Headweb is legal and offers movies for free, as rentals or as downloads.
Some videos are available for unlimited streaming through an advertising supported model while others are available to purchase or rent for a small fee.
Headweb acquires all the rights to distribute the movies to our users and also makes sure that the rights owners and creators gets paid for making their content available.

Advertising

Headweb offers advertisers an oppurtunity to associate their brands with premium video content and connect with highly engaged consumers. Headweb will continue to develop innovative features and services along with advertising experiences for online video.

Innovative technology

P2P

Headweb is using a custom peer2peer distribution technology to deliver downloads. We based the new p2p technology on bittorrent and added more functionality to it. One great feature added is that users that take part in the distribution gets rewarded. This means that all users helping out earn credits which are valid as payment in the store. There are also other ways of earning credits e.g. being an active member in the community: writing comments, ratings etc (yep, we pay you to help).

Watermarking instead of DRM

Digital rights management (DRM) makes online music and video services harder to use and offers limited protection against copying of files. For legal movie services to be accepted by all users, we believe the DRMs need to become better or removed on downloads. Because DRM is counter intuitive and only hurts purchasing customers (rather than protecting against piracy). Some say more user friendly DRMs will come but we couldn't wait for those - and we are sure there are better ways to make business. That's why all content on Headweb.com is DRM-free.

Headweb was the first legal service to offer DRM-free downloads that works for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Watermarking

A better solution to DRM to control intellectual property is the use of Watermarks. Headweb has developed a patent pending technique to watermark downloads and uses watermarks on some movies. Watermarks are invisible to the human eye and offers traceability of illegally spread files. We believe watermarking is a good compromise between restrictive DRMs and making content more easily available.

Background

The future is online. Watching and downloading movies off the internet is already the present for many users and is increasing in popularity. Many want to buy and download movies but few legal services exists that offers the flexibility and ease of use that everyone wants.

Services are often found difficult to use compared to more easy but illegal alternatives. Many services also offers lesser audio and video quality compared to DVD and copy protections restricts the way we can use our legally purchased movies. Headweb has changed this!

Last modified 2010-02-23 10:40 by Martin Gustavsson