Microsoft says its Movies & TV app on both Xbox and Windows 10 will support Disney's Movies Anywhere service starting this week
Tom Warren / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Disney built Movies Anywhere as a cross-store digital locker, and its reach jumped when four major Hollywood studios joined the service in October 2017, unifying purchases from Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu. Microsoft's Movies & TV app — renamed away from the Xbox branding back in 2015 — has until now been a standalone store without a path into that shared library.
Adding Movies Anywhere support turns Microsoft's app into another window onto the locker rather than a walled store of its own, which matters because Xbox and Windows 10 give Disney's service two large installed bases it didn't previously cover.
First-order effects
- Xbox and Windows 10 users can now pull their Movies Anywhere libraries — films bought at iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, or Vudu — into the Movies & TV app instead of being limited to titles purchased from Microsoft.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's own store competes less on locking buyers in and more on playback convenience, since a purchase made anywhere follows the user onto Xbox; rival retailers gain the same benefit, raising the value of joining the locker over staying siloed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, digital movie retail consolidates around the locker layer — the service later extending to its first smart TV app on LG TVs points the same direction — leaving platform holders like Microsoft as interchangeable endpoints whose differentiation shifts to devices and apps rather than exclusive catalogs.
The trend: Digital film purchasing is consolidating around cross-studio lockers like Movies Anywhere that decouple ownership from any single retailer, turning console and PC apps into neutral playback surfaces.