Tesco Launches Movie Download Service

Tesco, the largest British retailer by both global sales and domestic market share with profits exceeding £2 billion comes with its own movie and TV download service to challenge Apple's popular iTunes.

The service will make available for download films and TV shows produced by Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Among the first releases are Spider-Man 3 and Superbad.

This bold move from Tesco will be sustained by its music download service already offered by the company via Tesco Digital online store. The company promises to make all the music customers can purchase through the site available in the universal MP3 format.

"We said back in April when we launched our site that "Our aim for the Tesco Digital site is for it to be more than just a music download portal," Graham Harris, Tesco's commercial director declared. "We wanted to create an exciting and easy-to-use entertainment shop that Tesco customers of all technical ability can use and trust. This next development confirms we are doing just that."

The prices will start from £1.87 for television programs, £10.97 for new release movies and £10.97 for cinema classics. The company intends to roll out a rental service in the following months.

This service coming from Tesco will be competing with Apple’s iTunes which currently is the leading source of music and movie downloads in the UK. With the iTunes store users can rent or buy movies from most of the major studios, with new releases costing around £10.99.

Telegraph.co.uk quotes Sarah Johnson, an analyst at Screen Digest as saying: "Tesco is the second largest DVD retailer in the UK, but this strong position in the physical market is unlikely to be replicated in the digital sector. Tesco Digital's lack of device strategy will act as a major obstacle to adoption. The two services dominating the UK transactional online video market, Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Xbox Live Video Marketplace, are tightly bound to a device."