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Your YouView box isn’t just for the latest telly — you can now use it to own the latest movies too. If you’re on BT you can buy high definition blockbusters including The Wolverine, Elysium and Captain Phillips and watch them whenever you like.
If you’re a BT Broadband or Infinity customer you can buy, and keep, films for £8.99 in high definition, or £5.99 for standard definition — and if you leave BT, your films get sent to you on DVD.
BT has done a deal with studios 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures, so new movies available over the next few weeks include The Wolverine, Turbo, The Croods, Elysium, Captain Phillips and The Smurfs 2. Older movies on offer include Zuck’em-up The Social Network, the Alien series, and Jerry Maguire.
Once you’ve bought a film, it lives in the BT catalogue in your YouView box, from where you can watch each film whenever you want, as many times as you want. BT plans to add the option of buying movies to BT TV set-top boxes in coming months.
Or you could just, y’know, buy the DVD.
Sadly you have to stream a film each time rather than just downloading it once, which means it depends on your broadband connection. You can’t watch on other devices, but a spokesperson for BT told me today that it’s working on apps.
Also, if you leave BT, your films are sent to you on DVD rather than Blu-ray, so you miss out on HD films.
Sky is launching its own service to buy and keep movies later this year. For now, Sky and Virgin media offer movies to rent through your set-top TiVo or Sky+ box, or you can download movies and TV shows to your tablet with Sky Go Extra — but you can’t keep them. Online rivals including Blinkbox do let you buy as well as rent HD and SD movies, although once again the disadvantage is you’re limited to streaming films you’ve bought from your library on the Blinkbox site. That said, Blinkbox does have apps on tablets, smart TVs and games consoles.
How do you watch movies online? Is there still no substitute to physical media when it comes to owning movies? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
