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Disney to shutter online movie site

LOS ANGELES » The Walt Disney Co. is shutting down its Web movie service, Disney Movies Online, saying the site wasn’t keeping up with user demands.

In an email to users, the company said the site would be closed as of Dec. 31.

The site allowed visitors to buy and rent movies from the Disney library, including films made by its subsidiary Pixar. It also allowed people who purchased physical discs to stream the movies from the website.

However, the site did not attract many customers and had limited capabilities. Users couldn’t download their digital movies for offline playback, there was no support for connected devices like game consoles and it only offered movies for streaming on Web browsers.

Disney did not say when a replacement service would be launched.

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BlackBerry being dropped by NTSB

Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry is being dropped for use by the U.S. government agency that investigates plane accidents because of the device’s reliability problems.

The National Transportation Safety Board disclosed its plan to switch to Apple Inc.’s iPhone 5 in a recent document posted to a federal website. The BlackBerrys have been "failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate," according to the NTSB’s notice.

The 400-employee agency "requires effective, reliable and stable communication capabilities to carry out its primary investigative mission and to ensure employee safety in remote locations," it wrote.

RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, has been hit by recent defections from U.S. agencies and is counting on its new BlackBerry 10 devices to shore up business among its more than 1 million government customers in North America.

Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins said he expects at least 400,000 government customers in North America to embrace BlackBerry 10 in a wave of device upgrades.

The new operating system is at the heart of RIM’s comeback attempt, following years of market-share losses to Apple’s iPhone and devices running Google Inc.’s Android operating system.