Sky is bringing a new buy-and-keep movie service to the UK and Ireland ‘in the coming weeks’

On the same day that BSkyB rolled out a brand new Sky+ EPG homepage to help push its on-demand content, Andrew Griffith, Chief Financial Officer & MD, Commercial Businesses at Sky, has revealed its brand new ‘buy and keep’ service is set to launch “in the coming weeks”.

Griffith made the reveal on stage at the Guardian Changing Media Summit in London earlier today, and although details around the new service are scant, we do know that it will be arriving imminently, and will complement its existing transactional Sky Store rental service.

“Having millions of our customer homes connected, means we can think about expanding the number of transactional content windows we offer, moving closer and closer to the theatrical release date, while continuing to complement out existing subscription movie service,” said Griffith.

“Having made a strong start in rentals, we think we can go one step further, and start offering customers the opportunity to purchase movies from us, to keep forever,” he continued. “The market’s worth an estimated £1.4 billion a year, and although it’s occupied by some pretty big brands, we think we are extremely well positioned to enter the market and take share. In the coming weeks, we’ll launch our buy and keep service for movies, operating under the Sky Store brand.”

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Sky Store opened its doors to everyone in the UK and Ireland back in December, having previously been restricted to Sky TV subscribers only. And its move into movie downloads, letting users retain a title forever, is an obvious next step for sure. Just a few weeks back, Amazon finally brought Amazon Instant Video outside the US, arriving in the UK and Germany. And this is similar to Tesco’s Blinkbox too, which lets you purchase the latest releases on-demand, on a pay-per-title basis. Yes, there’s iTunes and Google Play Movies too.

Sky Store is currently available on on the Web, Sky+ HD box, the NOW TV Box, Roku and YouView. Though Griffith didn’t mention anything specific about making purchases available on all devices, he did say it would be “delivered to your main TV set,” which obviously suggests it will at least be available through your main Sky+ set-top box. There’s nothing to suggest purchased titles won’t be available in the exact same way as rented movies are.

More details on this will come to fruition in the coming weeks. But given Sky’s existing reach into households around the country, this will undoubtedly prove popular with many – though perhaps we’re best waiting to see the full pricing before coming to too many conclusions here.

Feature Image Credit – BEN STANSALL/AFP/GettyImages