Sonic Solutions is slowly taking white label online video into the major retailers who don’t have their own, and has added both Sears and Kmart stores in a deal announced this week.
The renamed RoxioNow (using Sonic’s Roxio brand, and its acquired CinemaNow online film service) will be sold throughout the $44 billion chain of department stores (Sears now owns Kmart), which will be sold attached to a range of Internet-connected devices including TVs, Blu-ray players and mobile phones.
Sears has bought a license to the RoxioNow platform and the new services will launch later this year and be broadly promoted at retail stores throughout the US.
“Teaming up with Sonic is a great opportunity for Sears and Kmart to quickly establish a position in digital video entertainment, and offer another great service to our customers,” said Karen Austin, President of Home Electronics for Sears Holdings. “With direct access to so many movies and TV shows from a broad range of devices, our customers will have the ability to obtain the latest high-quality entertainment virtually anywhere, anytime.”
Sonic has already signed up major retailers Best Buy and Blockbuster and uses its infrastructure and technology to deliver the Blockbuster online movie store, which it acquired from studios under the name Movielink.
The RoxioNow library contains films from 20th Century Fox, Disney, DreamWorks, MGM, Miramax, NBC Universal, Sony, Warner Brothers and Lions Gate Entertainment ‘ which is pretty much ALL of the major US film studios which make up Hollywood, with the exception of Viacom’s Paramount. Sears will help add pressure on consumer electronics equipment vendors to put the RoxioNow service on more and more devices. These are all listed as Sears Digital devices which are ‘powered by RoxioNow.’
Sonic reports that premium content, the division which sells this service, produced around 14% of last year’s annual revenues of $104 million, suggesting that this business is already at $14 million and growing.