Movies Anywhere: At last, all your films in one place – thanks, Disney

In my wallet, there are loyalty cards for Sainsbury, Tesco and the Co-op making a mockery of the term “loyalty”. Still, I’m not alone in being so purchase-promiscuous: millions of people have bought digital movies on Google Play, iTunes, Amazon Video or Vudu over the years. If you’re in this particular boat, it means you need to keep every app and dig through each one looking for the movie you bought in that sale back in 2012… was it Amazon or Google?

Not so anymore: Disney’s Movies Anywhere service has just got a whole lot more useful, thanks to a deal struck between the Warner Bros., Universal, Sony Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox. The app will draw in any films from these studios that you’ve bought on iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play or Vudu into one handy account ready to watch wherever. Conspicuous by their absence are Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate, but that just means your copy of The Love Guru can be your little secret for a while longer.

Starting in the US, the app is available for iOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon Fire devices and Roku, and it supports Chromecast, making this the ultimate way to watch movies. The site is currently down – presumably struggling with the sudden interest in a service that has ticked along for three years as a Disney-only provider – but it’s worth persevering with if you have a digital movie collection worth anything. Wired notes that people signing up to the service and linking at least two retail accounts will be gifted with copies of Ice Age, Ghostbusters (the 2016 version), Big Hero 6, Jason Bourne and The Lego Movie.

The one thing potentially holding Movies Anywhere back is the tricky question of whether enough people still buy digital movies to make the service worthwhile. I personally don’t own any, preferring to stream the TV and movies I want to watch, and fill the licensing gaps with cheap DVDs and Blu Rays. But if you have any digital movies at all, this is a solution to your problem with no visible downsides.