Presto Entertainment, the TV streaming joint venture from Foxtel and Seven West Media, is now open for business.
Announced in December 2014, Presto Entertainment is a complement to the existing Presto Movies, providing a catalogue of TV episodes — including content from Showtime and HBO — all available on demand.
Similar to Presto Movies, Presto Entertainment operates on a monthly fee with no lock-in contract. Presto said that it would offer the service separately to Movies, but that users could choose to subscribe to a bundled offering. At the time no pricing was announced.
On its Twitter account last night Presto said that it would be “performing maintenance” between midnight and 4am before coming back online with “big news”.
We’ll be offline while performing maintenance between 12-4am tonight, but back online in the morning with big news! pic.twitter.com/DAXQpdaNVp
— Presto (@presto) January 14, 2015
Although no formal announcement has been made, visitors to the Presto site or app today can browse the episodes on offer and sign up for the either Presto TV services or a combined offering of TV and Movies.
Although Presto Entertainment was the name given to the TV service, the website uses the terms Presto Movies and Presto TV, with Presto Entertainment referring to the bundled offering.
As expected, the TV streaming services is priced the same as Movies: AU$9.99 a month. The Presto Entertainment bundle of both TV and Movies is AU$14.99 — actually cheaper than Presto Movies’ original AU$19.99 launch price.
Presto’s TV offering is just the first of a number of TV video-on-demand services launching in 2015, with Stan from Fairfax and Channel Nine on the way, along with the much anticipated arrival of Netflix into the Australian market set for March.
A Presto spokesman said that an announcement from the company about the launch of the TV service would come “later in the day”.