Amazon buys Lovefilm! There’s an exciting sentence. Lovefilm has announced this morning that Amazon will gobble up the remaining shares in the movie rental and streaming service to go from a minority shareholder to owning the entire thing. Amazon’s acquisition is still subject to a few more contractual hurdles but should be approved by the end of Q1 2011. How this will affect Lovefilm isn’t clear yet. In the US, Amazon offers an HD movie rental service so we could see Lovefilm rebranded or tweaked to deliver the UK version. We’ll bring you more news on the Amazon Lovefilm deal as soon as we have it.
Tagged ‘rental’
Youtube’s getting set to show live sport and already has full TV shows. But now it’s dabbling with a movie rental service. The small scale experiment teams Youtube with the Sundance Film Festival but could be the beginning of a much bigger move…
The Sony PSP could be about to get game rental downloads to go with its TV and movies on demand. Could this be one in the i for DSiWare? Read on to find out how we know.
Netflix has been an ace in up Microsoft’s sleeve since November, eclipsing Sony’s rival video download service with the huge library of Netflix streaming titles, but it could be about to lose that particular position if Netflix and Nintendo cosy up. The movie rental service has been sending round a survey asking Wii owners if they’d consider paying a one off, $10 fee to get movie streaming direct to their console.
iTunes is offering US users the chance to purchase High Definition movie downloads, rather than rent them. Rentals will still work, but buyers will get first dibs on film releases.
High street games retailer GAME is to launch a videogames rental service in conjunction with SwapGame – the imaginatively named GAME Rentals.
We’d almost given up waiting for movies to turn up on iTunes, but Apple surprised us this morning by piling tons of full length movies onto its download store, complete with rental and purchase options.