Best Buy teaming with Cinema Now to deliver streaming movies

Best Buy is teaming up with Sonic Solutions Inc. to provide customers on-demand access to streaming movies and TV shows.

Best Buy plans to embed Sonic's Roxio CinemaNow onto a large variety of devices like web-connected TVs, portable media players, PCs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, and mobile phones. Once the merge has been complete, Best Buy customers can buy or rent from the CinemaNow catalogue, which includes older archived films as well as new releases, and some television shows. "Our relationship with Sonic Solutions allows Best Buy to quickly establish a strong position in the digital delivery of video entertainment," Brian Dunn, chief executive of Best Buy, said in a statement. "It also enables us to make deeper and more meaningful connections with our customers and expand our relationships with content owners and hardware vendors to create compelling new home entertainment solutions." "With Best Buy's focus, we expect on-demand entertainment to quickly grow into a mass market activity, with digital sell-through and rental becoming a significant new revenue stream for content owners," said Dave Habiger, president and chief executive of Sonic Solutions, in a statement. This is not the first collaboration with an outside technology firm, as earlier in the year, Best Buy announced a partnership with TIVO in an effort to offer TiVo brand digital recorders with Best Buy content.