MovieFone Advances AOLís Commerce Position

America Online has agreed to pay an estimated $388 million in stock for closely held MovieFone, which delivers movie information and tickets via both its telephone service (777-FILM) and its website. MovieLink.com. MovieFone is based in Los Angeles and New York. With the purchase of MovieFone, AOL acquires one of the most famous spoken messages outside of cyberspace (""Hello! And welcome to MovieFone!""). Now the ending will be ""AOL MovieFone.""MovieFone serves listing information for about 17,000 movie screens in the U.S. and Canada, and does ticketing for about 3,000 of those. Plans are to add 1,500 more screens to the ticketing service over the next few months.Industry observers are saying that the deal is a key move into the kind of electronic commerce that will eventually be a part of consumersí daily routines. And ticket selling is a major e-commerce opportunity for entertainment commerce networks. Already both Digital City and its two main competitors, Ticketmaster Online/City Search and Microsoft Sidewalk, currently provide movie listings, but neither Sidewalk nor CitySearch sells movie tickets online. Ticketmaster Online has exclusive contracts in many venues to sell tickets to concerts, theatres, and sporting events. MovieFone has been able to attract advertisers to its service, which the company says, is their core business, which accounts for 70 percent of MovieFoneís revenue.