This is refreshing honesty from a digital media boss - Lovefilm co-founder and COO William Reeve tells E-consultancy how the DVD renter/retailer’s online download service, launched in March, is going: “It’s going. The issue is that we’re not offering as good value on it as we’d like to ... Although it’s competitively priced, it’s not something I could tell my friends they should use. Buying a download of something like King Kong for £20 when you can buy the DVD for £15 – why would you do that?”

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The problem, Reeve says, is his “hands are tied by the studios”, some of which price downloadable movies extra-high to protect sales of physical copies even though distribution of bits is cheaper than that of atoms: “There’s a situation where different studios have different policies, there isn’t consistency in pricing and there isn’t a range of content we would be proud of. We have some good titles – a few thousand, but our DVD service has almost 70,000 titles.”