It looks like Sears wants to get in the online movie market. The retail company, which also owns Kmart, has just announced that it is launching a Netflix-like movie download service, called Alphaline Entertainment.
Powered by Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow platform (Rovi just bought Sonic Solutions for $720 million), Alphaline allows Sears and Kmart customers to download movies and and TV shows online. The company says that it plans to make the platform available to users on a variety of devices, including mobile.
A number of Sears’ competitors including Walmart have already started to dabble in the online movies space. Walmart recently bought Vudu, a service that streams movies to internet-connected TVs. BestBuy teamed up with Sonic to put its movie library in all of the Web-connected devices the company sells at its stores.
But when it comes to actual movie rentals from the web, these companies haven’t been able to compete with giants like Netflix. It should be interesting to see how long Alphaline survives.