Lycos as a VOD player? Who Knew?

Remember Lycos? Of course you do. Remember when you last used the site? Of course you don't. Perhaps that's exactly why the company's taking the site in a new direction: video on demand (VOD) rentals.

Started as a Carnegie Mellon University research project in 1994, Lycos was one of the first web search engines. By 1999 it was one of the most visited sites in the world. Then Yahoo and Google happened. While it still maintains respectable traffic worldwide, Lycos, now owned by Daum Communications, the second largest portal in Korea, is hardly more than an after-thought in the "Web 2.0" world.

In 2005 the company decided to shift its strategy away from search to online communities and broadband entertainment. This transition is continuing with the launch of Lycos Cinema.

An online video on demand service, Lycos offers both free and premium content. The free content is ad-supported, while the premium content takes a new approach: fees based on the number of "seats," that is how many people you want to watch the film with. Here is a sample clip from the "Little Shop of Horrors..."





That's the key component Lycos Cinema feels will set itself apart from the competition: social interaction. When you load up a movie, a chat room appears on the left hand side. Here, you can invite and interact with friends about the content you're all watching. It's a cute idea, at least in theory.

In reality there are problems:

First, the content is awful. It's not that I haven't heard of all of the films (only most of them), it's that there's no way I would pay to watch most of them.

Second, Lycos Cinema faces some stiff competition. In the growing field of VOD you have Apple's iTunes movie rentals, Amazon's Unbox rentals and Netflix's Watch-It-Now, among others. All of them offer much better content at similar prices with a much better experience. Even the free stuff on Lycos can't begin to compare with what the NBC and Fox-backed online video site Hulu offers.

The third problem, unfortunately, is that the site throws errors left and right. About half of the time most pages didn't load at all and instead spat out error code. Even if you wanted to rent a movie, you might not be able to -- it's a total crap shoot.

If you are able to get to the featured rentals promo page, you'll notice a top section that looks quite a bit like iTunes movie rentals' CoverFlow view. It's really kind of pathetic.

Lycos sold to Spain's Terra Networks in 2000 for $5.4 billion. It was resold in 2004 to the aforementioned Daum Communications Corp. for $95.4 million. At that rate it's due for another sale this year, priced down even more. Webcast anyone?

Cybercast credit: Lycos Video