Blockbuster in video download pact

In an effort to keep pace with rival Netflix, Blockbuster has announced a partnership to offer instant access to its video library through various home and portable devices.

The movie rental company has partnered with Sonic Solutions to offer more than 10,000 movies for rent and sale to a variety of PCs, cell phones, portable media players, Internet-connected televisions, and Blu-ray disc players. The collection of offerings will be a combination of titles from Blockbuster and CinemaNow, a movie downloading service that Sonic recently purchased.

"Blockbuster is a ubiquitous entertainment presence in the physical world. Through this alliance with Sonic, we plan to become a ubiquitous presence in the digital world as well," Jim Keyes, Blockbuster's CEO, said in a statement. "Our goal is to offer consumers the most digital content, the most accessibility, via the most devices, both in and out of home."

While Blockbuster already has an existing library of online titles, thanks to its earlier acquisition of MovieLink, the CinemaNow partnership could get Blockbuster content onto more third-party boxes, such as all of the LG Blu-ray players and home theater systems announced at last week's CES

The partnership is Blockbuster's latest attempt to match Netflix, which has expanded past its DVD-by-mail service to offer movie streaming on Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console, Blu-ray players, and TiVo digital video recorders. In November, Blockbuster introduced the MediaPoint player, a set-top box that--like Netflix's Roku--offers on-demand content to a consumer's TV.

Blockbuster plans initially to sell videos or rent them on a pay-per-view basis, but the movie rental chain said it is considering offering a subscription plan for unlimited access to Blockbuster's digital library.

Netflix already provides a free Web-streaming service to customers who are signed up for a monthly subscription that costs at least $8.99.

[PhaseDMA]

Well its a step in the right direction.

[adasha76]

It's about time - they were quickly losing relevance

[EdEvery]

Netflix "free" instant streaming service has 12,000 titles but is maddeningly poorly designed. The means they provide to search this service or otherwise find what you want to see is infuriatingly inept.

Blockbuster has an opportunity.

[Maclover1]

They should hook with Sony and the PS3 for sure at a min.

[jlm429]

why not do what amazon does and just rent videos from their website without the subscription?

[microg]

Has long has Blockbuster doing this? I remember renting Cube out via a $2.99/rental download (maybe about a month ago)? I was originally looking to see if they had it at my local Blockbuster but saw the download option and went for it.

[marvin25]

This is no surprise as Blockbuster see that it will be sending movies to the same ISP that is being used by Netflix. They expect the volume will be great and no worry about net neutrality involved in this operation. The ISP can handle all that they can throw at them with no problem. The only thing they must have the bandwidth available. They are not looking at the other ISP in the country in doing this. It is complete change in way the Internet is run as this ISP offers true Internet. This will force changes in the concept of the Internet over time and they are adding broadband very fast. They provide constant bandwidth no matter many how people are on line. The bottom line this is no surprise as they plan to basically supply this ISP with most of the traffic.

[edisoncruz]

I've been really hoping for this for a long time. For whatever reason I've always felt more comfortable with Blockbuster as a service than I have with Netflix. Maybe it's because I remember going to Blockbuster since I was 5 yrs old back when the hot games to rent were for the NES and growing up using Blockbuster ever since. I have a feeling their implementation will be great.

[Centient]

Whatever. Why they NEED to partner with this company, and how such a partnership changes anything for BB customers isn't clear in the article. As I understand it BB currently has the means to stream movies at no cost under their Total Access plans. Doing so would put them nearly instantly on equal footing with Netflix (sans the 360 access). Instead they introduced a pay-for-stream service that I'll bet has been met with little enthusiasm considering the plethora of like services currently available. In reality Blockbuster could easily be matching Netflix and exceeding other video delivery providers in terms of services at this time, but will not or cannot do so. However this is a company seems all but doomed to collapse under the weight of it's own ineptitude at some point in the not so distant future. Given their history (censorship, years of ridiculous fines, lack of innovation) I suspect they won't be missed.

[skillingssucks]

Screw Hollywood and its 24-hour rule! And they wonder why people steal movies.

[umbrae]

Hey Blockbuster, get this on my 360 like Netflix! Otherwise, it will be too little to late.

[baisa]

Internet movie viewing is still crap. I was a Netflix subscriber and at least a third of the movies I tried to watch ran into troubles ("Your internet connection has slowed...") -- one time it said something like "your playback will resume in 2 hours" -- ridiculous! And then sometimes it just froze, and I had to close the browser completely, restart, seek to my previous place, etc. A really crappy experience. Last night, I was trying to watch eps 3,4 of 24 on Hulu, and they stuttered and paused many times, again, very annoying. Lost on abc.com is very spotty -- sometimes works great, other times has a lot of sputtering, etc. And all of these systems have their own player technologies, some of which work quite well (Hulu), others which are just downright lame and buggy (the viewer used by abc.com).

The thing missing from ALL of these services is a focus on: simplicity, reliability, "it just works" -- they are all solutions created by computer programmers, not product designers. Until these services work as well and dependably as discs, they will not compete...

[allyduan]

oh,i have been hoping this for a long time. Often encountered some delays there.

Now we can watche the streaming movies on PC. But can we download the streaming movies while watching ?

Last week i downloaded a streaming video recorder, it can download some streaming videos free.

http://www.flash-on-tv.com/streaming-video-recorder.html#124

[kelmon]

Question: will this service fall foul of the same "exclusivity" deals that mean that content disappears from online movie services because of deals done by the movie studios with satellite and cable TV channels? This is one of the reasons why I have not adopted a download service yet since this issue does not affect Blockbusters' bricks 'n' mortar shops.