Best Buy Confirms Digital Content Plans

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, November 3. 2009 at 03:15 PM EST 2 comments

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Best Buy Co. Inc. took a big step into the digital arena today, finally announcing plans to embed a branded digital storefront in a wide range of broadband-connected consumer electronics (CE) devices.

The new digital storefront will be powered by Sonic Solutions (Nasdaq: SNIC)'s Roxio CinemaNow service, and will be introduced initially on Best Buy's Insignia line of CE devices. The retailer is also reportedly in talks to embed the digital storefront in CE devices from companies like Samsung, LG Electronics, and Sony.

The announcement comes about four months after Contentinople first reported Best Buy's plans for the service.

By launching a storefront on CE devices, Best Buy aims to compete with Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) and VUDU Inc. , which have introduced similar offerings.

But as reported in our earlier story, Best Buy is looking beyond just offering streaming video on HDTVs and Blu-ray players. Best Buy and CinemaNow content will also use Widevine Technologies Inc.'s digital rights management (DRM) technology to secure content across multiple devices.

By doing so, Best Buy could enable a consumer to buy a title once and watch it on multiple platforms. So a consumer could choose to watch the title on an Insignia big-screen TV, download it to a PC, or possibly even take it with him on the go using a portable DVD player or other mobile device.