Games vending machines to appear on UK streets

Sony Entertainment and Universal Pictures have teamed up to bring "instant entertainment" vending machines, packed chock full of PS3 games, Blu-ray movies and downloadable music, to Britain’s street corners.

The PoP "entertainment vending machine", shown off at Stuff Magazine’s Stuff Live Expo recently, will be able to satisfy multimedia cravings at all hours and will accept both cash and credit cards for the pleasure.

UK punters will soon be able to download music and movies to their iHeart’s delight, straight onto their MP3/MP4 players, SD cards or most other USB-supporting portable devices.

Want a proper DVD? The machine can give you those too, popping out Blu-ray and game DVDs all shrink wrapped and ready to use, 24/7.

The touchscreen machine will also purportedly let customers get a sneak peak at what they’re buying by allowing punters to check out trailers before coughing up the cash.

Sony and Universal reckon the vending machines are an important phase in their plans for the future distribution of PlayStation 3 games, Blu-ray movies and digital music, and are promising 150 movie titles at launch. Don’t get too excited though, at least one of those is said to be Mama Mia.

What the firms have failed to mention thus far is whether DRM will be a factor in the vending machine multimedia and which file formats will be available to downloaders.

But no doubt we’ll find out soon enough here in Britain, with PoP coming to a dodgy dark alley near you very soon. The rest of the world will just have to wait with baited breath till Sony and Universal figure out whether or not it’s a good idea.