Movies on USB drives

Kingston today announced that it has teamed up with Paramount Pictures to deliver full-length movies on it's flash memory products. The company announced that the movie offerings on USB and SD cards will help reach wider audience as more and more movies are viewed on computers and other portable devices.

Owning movies on a USB or SD drive falls somewhere between owning a physical disc and owning/renting/streaming digital content in terms of consumer's perception about owning something that they buy. Nowadays almost every computer comes with a DVD drive and not all portable devices support SD cards. This is going to narrow down the prospective audience for this new offering. Also, as people are moving towards Blu-ray high definition content, it would be difficult to get people buy this DVD quality movie offering in USB/SD cards.

 As more and more content is made available in digital format, it remains to be seen whether this kind of offering is going to help Hollywood studios that are already affected by dwindling DVD/CD sales.