Tesco’s collab with Microsoft continues with a new announcement for home cinema fans: they’ve created what they call a “virtual DVD” experience, letting you download the movie you’ve just bought on to your computer, extras and all. Read on to see what the plan is.
The first step, kicking off this Autumn, will allow anyone who buys selected DVDs at Tesco to download them at near DVD quality, presumably to make movies easier to watch on laptops without optical drives.
The Tesco virtual DVDs will also offer exclusive extra content, including games and (shudder) ring tones, making it the BD-Live of standard definition.
The Tesco virtual DVDs are powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight software, so will run on PCs and Macs, but clearly both companies would like to pretend that programs like Handbrake don’t exist, or run on Windows, Mac and Linux, and let you convert DVDs to video files for free.
Still, the virtual DVD package should get even better over time and even “far exceed the DVD experience”, according to Tesco entertainment director Rob Salter, so we’re staying optimistic on this one. And guys, if you fancy giving us a bit of movie streaming without having to buy the discs too, we won’t complain.
