Warner Home Video and digital media provider Ruckus announced today that Ruckus plans to offer Warner feature films and selected television episodes to college students using the Ruckus subscription service. With the agreement, Ruckus will be adding recent Warner releases like Batman Begins and The Dukes of Hazzard to its video-on-demand catalog, along with Warner classics and commercial successes like The Shining and The Matrix.
Ruckus was co-founded by two MIT graduate students in 2002; the service offers fully licensed digital media to universities and college campuses in direct competition with file-sharing services. The thought is that offering students easy access to legitimately licenced, high quality material will reduce bandwidth costs, policy enforcement, and piracy via peer-to-peer file sharing services (along with the potential legal liability widespread piracy could bring on educational institutions). Not to mention creating a revenue stream for digital content providers and Ruckus itself.
Students enrolled at campuses using the Ruckus network can subscribe to the service "less than the average cost of a DVD movie" per semester; in addition to films, Ruckus offers more than 1.2 million music tracks and film titles from Turner Entertainment, Castle Rock, HBO Home Video, New Line Home Entertainment, and Warner Brothers. Ruckus licenses some content for academic use, and offers some social networking features for students on Ruckus campuses.
Ruckus currently boasts a growing number of campuses using its service, including major universities such as the University of Arizona and the University of Minnesota.
