Video Business reported several studios expanding their revenue-sharing offerings which involves measures to limit previously-viewed disc sales. Read the entire article.

As is common, Warner is prohibiting stores from selling rev-share copies until 29 days after street. However, through the entire six-month rev-share agreement term, stores are forbidden from selling any more than 20% of their units on films with box-office greater than $10 million.

Warner is requiring stores to destroy 80% of all units shipped with a box office equal to or greater than $50 million. Stores must destroy 70% on box office between $10 million and $50 million. There is no destruction necessary on rev-share titles with box office less than $10 million.

Stores must hold onto to this useless product for an additional 90 days after the six-month terms ends, in case Rentrak chooses to audit rentailers for compliance. After those 90 days, stores can discard the destroyed discs, though neither Warner nor Rentrak have specified how.

The newly formed NACS Media Solutions is launching a pilot program that will test digital vending kiosks at a number of major college campuses.  The kiosks will be provided through a partnership with Polar Frog Digital.  The Chronicle of Higher Education explains:

Starting this month, students will be given the choice of buying or renting DVD’s from the kiosks. Rental DVD’s will be encoded so that the quality of the images degrade after a set period of time — meaning that essentially they self-destruct after use. “It’s not exactly like Mission: Impossible where a little puff of smoke comes out,” jokes Mr. Schmidt.

Read the entire article here: College Bookstores to Begin Selling eTextbooks on Demand

An article from Ars Technica comments on the technology which makes renting burned DVDs possible:

The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes a spokesman as suggesting that the DRM technology for rentals won’t be software-based, but rather rely on the self-destructing DVD technology that’s already used for other rental schemes.

Read the entire article here: College bookstores turn to kiosks to stem e-textbook tide

The BBC’s Click investigates Hollywood’s new embrace for digital delivery of movies.  Here are a few clips from the article:

The studios are in an experimental mood.

Online, they are busy forging alliances with established players in the retail and entertainment world.

There are downloads-to-own, or downloads-to-rent, tie-ins with subscription services – for those prepared to pay the high wholesale prices the studios are demanding, you will find sites offering hundreds of recent movies – in reasonable quality.

The studios are beginning to tap into our desire to watch stuff whenever, wherever, on whatever we want. Some websites allow you to download and then sideload the content onto your mobile. Even handset makers are getting in on the act.

If you want the physical object as well then you are also catered for. Most of the studios are flirting with the idea of giving us a digital copy of the movie in a portable format on the physical DVD.

And if your DVD store is closed you can burn a disc in just a few minutes at a kiosk in the high street.

Read the entire article here: Hollywood’s digital graduation

The Digital Media Wire reports:

Japanese electronics firm Toshiba announced that it has made a $20 million investment in MOD Systems, the developer of a digital media delivery system for retailers that lets consumers download digital content for burning to an optical format.

Seattle-based MOD said that early next year it plans to expand its media delivery system, which lets consumers download content from store kiosks to SD memory cards, to include downloads of movies and TV shows, in addition to music.

Read the entire article here: Toshiba Invests $20M in Download Kiosk Firm MOD Systems

Video Business reports Polar Frog Digital kiosks will offer burn on-demand to college campuses.

Polar Frog Digital will begin rolling out digital download kiosks to seven college campuses next month through a deal with the National Assn. of College Stores, the two announced today.

NACS, a collegiate retail trade organization with 3,100 member stores, will add kiosks to campus bookstores at NYU, UCLA, San Diego State University, University of Colorado—Boulder, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Bowling Green State University.

Students at those schools will be able to use the touch-screen kiosks to download movies and TV shows and burn them to DVD or transfer them to a Flash or USB drive. They also will be able to buy downloads online or via mobile phone with the ability to download to a PC or burn it to DVD for pickup at the bookstore.

Read the entire article here: Download and burn kiosks roll out to colleges

In an article at Video Business, Danny King reports:

NCR, which boosted its second-quarter sales 13% from a year earlier to $1.33 billion, looks to gain customers in a kiosk market that’s expected to pull sales from traditional movie-rental stores during the next few years. U.S. consumers will spend $800 million at kiosks by 2010, triple the amount spent last year, according to Convergence Consulting Group. Meanwhile, store rental revenue, estimated at $5.4 billion last year, will fall to $3.1 billion by 2010, according to Convergence.

Last month, NCR announced plans to build kiosks for both Blockbuster and The New Release/Moviecube. Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie-rental chain, said NCR will make as many as 10,000 Blockbuster-branded installed machines by early 2010. The machines will let customers rent DVDs and eventually might let consumers buy discs and make digital downloads of certain titles, the companies said.

Read the entire article here: NCR to build DVD kiosk business

An article at Market Watch announced:

Dell and Sonic Solutions have teamed to make downloading and recording DVD movies easy with the first PC-based Qflix(TM) drives. Using an intuitive application, Roxio(R) Venue, movie collectors can search and select from a variety of major Hollywood hits available from CinemaNow, download them on their PC, transfer them to multiple digital devices in their home, and then create a permanent and portable DVD-format copy on Qflix DVD media.

Read the entire article here: Dell Premiers First Industry-Approved Burn-to-DVD Downloads