Best Buy sees entertainment future in digital delivery

As I noted yesterday, rumors dropped recently that Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE: BBY) will soon begin offering digital movie downloads from Lion's Gate studios (and most likely, other studios too) in its push to jumpstart the competition in the emerging market for digital content delivery. Yes, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s iTunes music store has had this market cornered for quite some time, starting with music downloads and continuing with movie and television show downloads. But, those pieces have been limited to the PC and iPod ecosystem (until the Apple TV came along this year, at least).

Consumers want their content to work across products, manufacturers and standards, which has been the reason why some movie download services have not gotten off to a start at all. When all the technical and content protection limitations are known by customers, they generally react like they should: "I'm just not interested." Best Buy's recent role expansion of an entertainment VP to oversee its U.S. entertainment business, however, shows that the retailer may in fact get its foot deeper into the emerging digital content field (music, movies, possibly more). That is, if it can give the market what it wants: unfettered and easy access to content across devices and platforms.

It's pretty apparent by now that entertainment content is moving towards all-digital delivery. It's cheaper, more immediate and has tremendous cost advantages. At the same time content owners continue to be scared to death that all these advantages could be stamped out by rabid content copying and unauthorized transmission over the Internet (without any payments changing hands). Will Best Buy be the one that makes digital content like music and movies easy to download, use and re-use on a variety of devices? It's recent focus on customer relationship development would point to "yes" as an answer to this question, although Apple has made the first bold move here. Who's next? If it's Best Buy, it will be hard to stop the distribution of digital content soon.