June 26 - 12:40pm EDT   Canadian rent-by-mail DVD service Zip.ca said today that it's in talks with Sonic Solutions, the owner of the Roxio CinemaNow movie download service, to bring the first large-scale movie download service in Canada. The partnership will allow PC and portable multimedia device users to download TV shows and movies, making it somewhat akin to the streaming feature Netflix offers its US customers; it's not clear if Zip would shadow this format. [full story]

June 25 - 10:55am EDT   Sonic Solutions, the company behind Roxio, on Thursday announced its streaming movie service CinemaNow will be made available for the Nintendo Wii. Sonic will partner with Fujisoft to bring the former's content to the game console via the latter's video-on-demand Everyone's Theater Wii service. While the announcement only covers Japan, its successful integration potentially leads to the service arriving in other countries as well. CinemaNow offers more than 1,500 streaming movies, short films, and concerts to buy or rent. [full story]

April 17 - 9:15am EDT   If accurate, a rumor floated today will see Best Buy leap into its own online movie store. Entertainment magazine Variety claims to have heard from movie studio executives that the retailer is talking to CinemaNow and "other online movie services" to establish a link between itself and one of these services. While what's involved is uncertain, Best Buy is likely to arrange for a cut of the revenues for each movie viewed and may promote hardware with that movie service's features built-in. [full story]

April 7 - 9:05am EDT   Blockbuster yesterday submitted a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing that reveals the company doesn't believe it can continue business. The video store is no longer certain that it can remain a "going concern" and may have to stop operations and close its doors if its financial situation doesn't improve in the near future. The warning comes in spite of a $250 million refinancing loan having been put in place just last week; Blockbuster now says there is "no assurance" that it can meet the requirements of the transaction before it's completed on May 11th. [full story]

January 14 - 2:45pm EST   Blockbuster and Sonic Solutions on Wednesday announced a multi-year agreement that will have the former deliver its library of digital movies and shows to home and portable electronics devices with Internet connectivity and Sonic software. The companies will also merge their digital libraries – including Sonic's recently purchased CinemaNow – and offer them under the Blockbuster brand, to create one of the largest VOD services on the market. [full story]

January 8 - 8:25pm EST   At its CES press conference on Wednesday, LG unveiled a pair of Blu-ray players with a world-first NetCast entertaintment Access, featuring access to streaming HD movies from Netflix, the CinemaNow library and YouTube videos. While both can bring the videos to users’ living rooms, only the BD390 sports 7.1-channel audio support, Wi-Fi connectivity and 1GB of built-in memory. Either can access online Blu-ray features such as BD Live and BonusView content and users can connect their thumb flash and external drives via USB connections for playback of MPEG4, JPEG, MO3 and WMA formats. [full story]

December 31 - 12:35pm EST   LG has announced the addition of two new entertainment options to its network-enabled Blu-ray players, CinemaNow and YouTube. CinemaNow offers some 14,000 movies, TV shows and other videos, and should join YouTube on LG players in the first half of 2009. LG’s only instant-streaming entertainment option is currently Netflix, which provides over 12,000 movies and TV shows, a portion of which are available in HD. [full story]

November 20 - 12:15am EST   Sonic Solutions on Wednesday announced it would acquire CinemaNow, a digital video distribution service with over 6000 Hollywood Movies, moving one step further in growing its Qflix service. The move will reportedly blend CinemaNow into the Qflix business group, and adopting the title of Premium Content Group. Sonic is hoping the further concentration of the two services will boost placement of CinemaNow and Qflix drives. [full story]

October 23 - 3:05pm EDT   Dell on Thursday announced it will partner with Universal Music Group to offer buyers of certain Dell computer systems pre-loaded music bundles to help them start their music collections. Each bundle will contain 50 or 100 DRM-free tracks that can be played on any digital media player or burned to a CD. The bundles start at $25 and so cost about half the price of current digital audio track. The content will be instantly accessible when buyers power up their Dell computers for the first time, saved in the widely used MP3 format and so not trapped to any one program or portable music player. [full story]

October 14 - 4:40pm EDT   Pioneer has teamed up with Qflix to allow users to create DVDs from downloaded content from the video download site, the electronics company announced on Tuesday. The two Pioneer drives, the internal DVR-2920Q and external DVR-X162Q, feature Qflix DVD Download & Burn technology that allow users to save the downloaded movies and TV show collections from CinemaNow on a format that is easy to store, find and play. Like the Dell drives with Qflix technology introduced last month, the Pioneer burners will require special blank discs in order to create movies. [full story]

September 15 - 12:40pm EDT   Dell announced on Monday it has partnered up with Sonic Solutions to make Qflix DVD drives that, together with software and special DVDs, will allow users to legally record downloaded movies to DVDs with formatting and DRM that works both on other PCs and in home theaters. The downloads will come from the CinemaNow service, though how many and which DVD titles or TV shows will be made compatible with Qflix is not known. The limit is a requirement to purchase DVDs from Roxio, which also supplies the software for the drive, to make the process possible. [full story]