Barnes Noble said on Tuesday it would introduce a new video store for its Nook products this fall, the latest expansion of the bookseller’s digital content.
The service will allow customers to stream and download movies and television shows for a fee onto TV’s and mobile devices, while storing the content in the Nook cloud. The video catalog includes HBO shows, like “Game of Thrones” and “True Blood,” and movies including “The Artist” and “Toy Story 3.”
Barnes Noble has focused heavily on its digital offerings to compete with retailers like Amazon and Apple. In April, it received a boost when Microsoft said it would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the bookseller’s digital division.
Barnes Noble’s Nook enters a crowded market of digital rental services that let viewers download movies and television shows to mobile devices. The video streaming service would be similar to Apple’s iTunes in that viewers could rent single episodes, movies or whole TV seasons. Wal-Mart entered the streaming business in 2010 with its $100 million acquisition of Vudu, which allows viewers to rent high-definition movies on Internet-enabled televisions. Many new television sets now come with the Vudu and Netfix apps built in. Verizon and Redbox recently partnered to introduce their own streaming service.
Major studies have taken a blow in home video revenue in recent years as DVD sales and traditional rentals decline. Deals like the one with Barnes Noble help bring in additional rental revenue and offer viewers another outlet on which to find content. That’s in combination with home-grown streaming services like HBO Go, which requires users to authenticate that they pay for Time Warner’s HBO before accessing hundreds of episodes of past and current shows on tablets and mobile devices.
William J. Lynch, the chief executive of Barnes Noble, said in a statement, “As one of the world’s largest retailers of physical video discs and digital copyrighted content, our new Nook Video service will give our customers another way to be entertained with a vast and growing digital video collection, as part of our expansive Nook store.”
Barnes Noble currently has about 25 percent of the e-book market. In August, the company reported a loss of $41 million, or 78 cents a share, in the quarter ending July 28. Nook sales were flat over the previous year, at $192 million.
On Tuesday, Barnes Noble also signaled its intentions to build a bigger presence in Britain. It said the company Dixons Retail, which owns the electronics retailers PC World and Currys, would sell Nook products in 600 stores. Barnes Noble also named Patrick Nourvillois as a managing director responsible for building the Nook brand “outside the U.S. across the globe.”
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/barnes-noble-to-introduce-new-video-service-for-nook-devices/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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