Blockbuster offers digital-rental discount

DIGITAL: First-time rental downloaders get 25% off of title price

By Danny King -- Video Business, 5/4/2009

MAY 4 | DIGITAL: Blockbuster this week began offering discounts to first-time renters of downloadable movie titles in an effort to build its digital-delivery business.

Blockbuster will give a 25% discount for the first title customers rent through the company’s Blockbuster OnDemand video-download service, the U.S. movie-rental chain leader said in an e-mail sent to customers today. The customers must rent the title by May 22 in order to get the discount.

Blockbuster has been trying to boost online sales by making its download service available through a wider range of electronics components while broadening its inventory of digital titles. In late March, Blockbuster and TiVo reached an agreement to have the video-rental chain’s digital titles downloadable to televisions through TiVo’s digital-video recorders by the second half of this year.

Blockbuster late last year started selling a set-top box that plays digital downloads from Blockbuster.com directly onto consumers’ TV sets after integrating what had been known as its Movielink digital download service into Blockbuster’s Web site in July.

In January, the company agreed to join with online movie service CinemaNow to create Blockbuster Powered by CinemaNow, which will start delivering movies to Blu-ray Disc players, Internet-connected TVs, mobile phones and even the iPhone later this year. The multi-year preferred provider agreement between Blockbuster and Sonic Solutions, which acquired CinemaNow late last year, will put the rental giant on some of the same devices through which its main online rival, Netflix, has already begun streaming its own digital content.