Filmnight.com is a company operating in the United Kingdom. The company has a chain of high street stores under a variety of brand names, a DVD retail website and a set of mobile services.
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Stores
Filmnight.com (or Filmnight as it was then branded) opened its first store in 2003 in Waterloo station renting DVDs to commuters. The filmnight.com website supported these activities by allowing customers to reserve DVDs in advance, making the pick-up a quick process. A second store opened in Reading station operating on the same model. Filmnight acquired Apollo Home Video in December 2004. Apollo, had itself grown through Acquisitions and thus some stores still carry the Vid Biz brand. The operations of both sets of stores were merged. Online booking is no longer available on the website.
A year later Filmnight.com acquired Primetime video stores. Following this acquisition, Filmnight.com has 99 fully owned stores and a further 120 franchises, making it the 4th largest video rental chain in the UK and the largest in the Greater London area.
The stores are expected to rebrand as Filmnight.com and will diversify into net-cafés as well as selling DVDs and mobile phones.
Website
The filmnight.com website expanded from a pre-ordering system for the stores to a DVD retail site after the company purchased the DVD section of the online retailer pricestorm.com. The site, operates out of Guernsey in order take advantage of a provision in the British tax code that states that VAT import duty is not payable on items sent from the Channel Islands costing under £18. As many DVD titles fall into this category, many DVD and CD retailers have taken advantage of this in order to cut costs and remain competitive in price.
The website also offers film soundtracks for sale, video on demand, trailers and cinema listings.
Mobile services
Filmnight.com entered the mobile services market by becoming the exclusive film content provider for Vodafone live! in the UK in 2004. As part of this service, they provide film trailers and clips for download onto 3G and GPRS phones. They joined the O2 network, providing similar services on the i-mode platform.
On both platforms, users can buy DVDs using their filmnight.com login details.
Additionally filmnight.com provides official mobile phone downloads services for various films e.g. Goal! and King Kong.