So for the past year or more, NCR and Blockbuster have tried to work through the process to create downloadable movie content through Kiosks. There have been some limited trials here and there but nothing on a larger scale yet.

Today MOD Systems announced in an interview with Video Business at the Digital Hollywood conference that they were negotiating with three retailers to launch more pilot tests of it machines during the second half of the year. You can check out the full article here.

These kiosks allow you to download content to SD cards. SD cards are the most popular memory cards found in digital cameras today and you can purchase them in very large capacity for $50 or less. Slowly we might see the consumer devices like DVD players, DVRs, set top boxes, and even TV sets that can play the content directly, but today you would likely have to play it through a computer if you were playing it in a home theatre. Presumably the content would play directly on some of the smaller media players like the Microsoft Zune or Creative Zen. I don’t see that they would push the content to work on the iPod or iPhone because Apple is already providing that in such a way that you can just pull movies over the air already and there is no SD slot on an iPod or iPhone.


In my own home theater configuration I could probably make something work if they provided the content in an iPod compatible format or one with DRM that lets me convert it so that I can push it through iTunes to my AppleTV. Otherwise, I just don’t see the SD content thing working. I’d just as soon watch the same thing through my AppleTV, or through Video on Demand on my set top box, or even through a Roku player with Netflix.

How do you see the SD downloadable content working?