Seagate to Preload FreeAgent Go Hard Drives with Paramount Pictures’ Movies

Seagate has teamed up with Paramount Pictures to preload some of its portal hard drives with movies. Seagate’s 500 GB FreeAgent Go will be the first of many hard drives to provide this offering.

First of all, anyone who buys one of these drives will receive a license for Star Trek for free. In addition, the drives will be preloaded with 20 popular Paramount Pictures titles which will be ulockable for a fee ranging from $9.99-14.99.

These pre-loaded titles include:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra
• Shooter
• The Hunt for Red October
• The Italian Job (2003)
• Ghost
• Patriot Games
• Beowulf
• Enemy at the Gates
• The Spiderwick Chronicles
• The Love Guru
• Coach Carter
• The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
• Nacho Libre
• Jackass 2.5
• A Plumm Summer
• Carriers
• Dance Flick
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

This is without a doubt an attempt to increase the use of Seagate’s FreeAgent Theater+1080P HD Media Player. More importantly this starts a brand new era in digital movie collecting. If it’s successfully accepted by the market, we’ll definitely see this evolve and expand.

There is no word on the quality or format of the movies at this time. Per Big Picture Big Sound the movies are roughly DVD-quality available in Windows Media Video format which means they are viewable on a Windows PC  via with Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 or Silverlight. File size ranges from 2.5-3 GB per movie. Files will also obviously be playable using the Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player (following a free firmware upgrade this month).

Editor Note: Seagate is selling the 500 GB FreeAgent Go for $99.99. Pricing is good until 5/10/2010. It looks like after that it will go to $139.99.

Source: Seagate