The biggest consumer electronics retailer in North America, Best Buy, has announced the company would expand its online movie and media download service, CinemaNow (powered by Roxio technologies), to support in-home consumer electronics.
CinemaNow allows consumers to rent and buy movies by downloading the movies to their computers on demand.
The service is already available for personal computers, including Windows, Mac, and Linux based machines, among others, but the service will now be expanded to various consumer electronics starting with blu-ray players through a partnership with the Korean electronics giant LG.
The company says it has plans to bring the service to more consumer electronics including home theaters and more widespread support throughout different brands and models.
The online movie and television rental space is becoming more and more saturated as large market participants including Wal-Mart, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Blockbuster, among countless other start-ups offer the same services with some differentiation.
Netflix for example, already offers its service through Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform, putting the service into millions of homes automatically via a simple firmware software update Microsoft recently released.
As more people begin to get their movies from the Internet for obvious convenience reasons, traditional movie rental services like Blockbuster have struggled more recently financially, prompting even traditional providers to offer their own online movie service, or risk going out of business.
The intensifying competition should continue to put downward pressure on prices.
The Best Buy stock (NYSE:BBY) opened 1.24-percent down to $42.58 per share in today’s trading session.
Murad is an engineering graduate from Centennial college in Toronto. He is responsible for everything tech. 
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