Sky's new Buy & Keep service sends you a DVD for every movie you download

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Sky has unveiled “Buy & Keep”, a new movie service that lets you, well, buy and keep films.

Until now, Sky only allowed its customers to rent movies from the Sky Store, but Buy & Keep supports downloads that can be stored forever on a Sky+HD box. And every download is supported by a physical copy (on DVD) that will arrive in the post three to five working days later, so if you do need to wipe the movie off your hard drive you’ll still have a backup.

Buy & Keep will make movies available at the same time as their DVD release, and Sky claims many will be available before their standard digital release on other platforms. Downloads will be available to watch “in minutes” and can be re-downloaded after deletion – provided you keep paying your Sky+ subscription.

The service will launch with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug available

The service is launching with hundreds of films, with highlights including The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, About Time, Life of Pi and The Wolverine, with The Wolf of Wall Street, Mandela and Mark Wahlberg ‘em up Lone Survivor all coming along within weeks. It won’t just be new stuff, of course, with “some of Hollywood’s best loved classics” also available. Films will be priced between £7.99 and £13.99 at launch.

At present, users will be able to watch purchased downloads only through a Sky+HD box, but in the next year Sky has promised that playback through smartphones and tablets will be supported, and beyond that TV show box sets will also be available to buy. And at some point, Sky says, purchases will be made available to non-Sky TV customers via the company’s Sky Store website.

One other thing that we’d like to see are the DVDs being replaced by Blu-rays and therefore high definition image quality – but that’s up to Sky.

Buy & Keep will be available “in the coming weeks”.

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Tech journalism's answer to The Littlest Hobo, I've written for a host of titles and lived in three different countries in my 15 years-plus as a freelancer. But I've always come back home to Stuff eventually, where I specialise in writing about cameras, streaming services and being tragically addicted to Destiny.