Sears Holdings Opens Digital Movie Store

Love movies in a downloadable format? If so, a new service dubbed “Alphaline Entertainment” might be worth a perusal. It comes from an unexpected company, Sears Holdings, and will be run on behalf of both Sears and Kmart. Powering the back-end is Sonic Solutions’ “RoxioNow” software, and as you’d expect, this service will be competing with all of the others out there.

Movie rental/purchasing sites seem to be a dime a dozen, and there isn’t anything noteworthy that Alphaline Entertainment immediately brings to the table. It is backed by a Goliath of a company, however, and that’s got to count for something. Of course, how much that matters when there is already fierce competition (such as iTunes), is yet to be seen.

The service does promise same-day releases, meaning that if you can purchase a film on Blu-ray or DVD, you should also be able to purchase it on this service without delay. Movies are set to run at around $10 ~ $20, while rentals should hover around the $4 mark. At the current time, the service is exclusive to Windows, so Mac OS X users are out. It can be assumed that this will be remedied in the future, though.

Dubbed Alphaline Entertainment, today’s launch is just part one of a series of moves on the part of the companies to make the service available in several different places. Going forward, Sonic will be bringing the offering to “a broad range of connected devices,” such as portable media players, Blu-ray players, and HDTVs, among others.