Big Entertainment Announces Agreement With Yahoo! To Deliver Movie Showtimes Content To Wireless Devices
Big Entertainment's Showtimes.com, Inc. subsidiary, one of the Web's largest suppliers of movie showtimes, has announced an agreement with Yahoo!Æ to deliver movie showtimes to handheld computers and other wireless devices. The agreement follows the recent launch of Yahoo! Mobile (http://mobile.yahoo.com), which provides Yahoo! users a platform to send customized content drawn from their My Yahoo! (http://my.yahoo.com) preferences to pagers, data phones, personal digital assistants, and an array of other wireless devices. BigE's Showtimes.com, Inc. currently provides Yahoo! with movie showtimes information for more than 30,000 theatre screens nationwide. BigE owns Hollywood.com, a leading movie Web site. ""This is a major entry into the emerging wireless arena, and we want to be at the forefront,"" said Mitchell Rubenstein, Chief Executive Officer of Big Entertainment. ""Yahoo! Mobile helps provide us with another great distribution platform. We're now able to reach an even greater number of consumers with our movie content."" As a first stage in the development of wireless data delivery, Yahoo! Mobile currently supports devices based on the Palm Computing platform as well as palm-sized devices running WinCE. Data delivery to other wireless devices is expected to arrive during the fourth quarter of 1999. With formatting optimized for each type of wireless device, Yahoo! Mobile is designed for seamless integration with Yahoo! and My Yahoo! to provide users with a familiar, intuitive interface and access to their personalized content. About Big Entertainment Silvers, who earlier founded the Sci-Fi ChannelÆ. Big Entertainment owns Hollywood.com, bigE.com, Baseline (pkbaseline.com ), and Showtimes.com, Inc. aka CinemaSource, a combination of movie-related Internet businesses that are being combined under the ""Hollywood.com"" brand. Hollywood.com ( http://www.hollywood.com ) is a premier movie Web site; bigE.com ( http://www.bige.com) is a leading online movie studio store; Baseline (pkbaseline.com ) is one of the largest online databases of movie information; and Showtimes.com, Inc. aka CinemaSource is the nation's largest provider of movie showtimes to the Internet. Big Entertainment also owns entertainment properties created for it by best-selling authors and media celebrities, including Leonard Nimoy and Mickey Spillane. CBS Corporation and BigE recently announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for CBS to receive a 30 percent ownership interest (with warrants to purchase an additional 5 percent ownership position) in Big Entertainment in exchange for $105 million of promotion, advertising, content and other consideration. (The matters discussed herein that are forward-looking statements are based on current management expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that may result in such expectations not being realized. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risks described in Big Entertainment's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.) Source: Big Entertainment, Inc. Web Site: http://www.bige.com.