All of Hollywood’s major studios except the Walt Disney Co began selling films online yesterday, a move that could make a trip to the video shop or even the cinema a thing of the past.

New releases can now be downloaded in America on the same day they become available on DVD. British film fans will have to wait until distribution rights issues are resolved.

Robert Thompson, head of the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture at Syracuse University, New York, called the online sales “the inevitable next step” in movies’ migration to the internet. “If I was a [cinema] owner I would be thinking of things that would make the movie experience just not the same,” he said. “In the future, we may go back to the early 20th century of ‘amateur nights’ and other live stuff on stage.”

Digital distribution is rewriting the rules of the movie business just as it did the record industry. The Hollywood hits go on sale online as Gnarls Barkley made music history by becoming the first single ever to hit No 1 in Britain solely on the basis of digital downloads.

Hollywood studios have been wary of releasing films over the internet for fear of cannibalising their lucrative DVD sales, which now account for more than double their box-office receipts. But they are under growing pressure to combat internet file-swapping and to make available more material for new devices such as the video iPod. One executive told the Hollywood trade paper Variety that the studios’ profit could be $5-$8 higher for an online sale than a DVD. The studios have already experimented with 24-hour online movie rentals, and Universal had already announced it would start online sales in Britain next week in partnership with the DVD rental website Lovefilm.

Another British website, Wippit, started offering permanent downloads in February but so far only independent films are available.

Six studios will now sell their films online at Movielink, a website jointly owned by Warner Bros, Sony Pictures, Universal, MGM and Paramount. Some 300 films by the website’s five owners plus 20th Century Fox, which is owned by The Times’s parent News Corp, will go on sale for $10-$30. Lionsgate and Sony will also sell films through Movielink’s main rival, CinemaNow, in which Lionsgate owns a stake. Movielink and CinemaNow will allow the movies to be played only on a computer rather than being copied on to a disk for a conventional DVD player.

Market research has shown that the overwhelming majority of online rental customers watch the movies on their computers, rather than bridging the so-called “last 10ft” by hooking up their PC to a television.

But new technology hitting the market this year will make it easier for consumers to watch web video on their TVs instead of their computer screens. Cinema-owners are watching nervously lest the digital release date creep closer to the opening day at the multiplex, cutting into their box- office receipts. The Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh simultaneously released his new film Bubble at cinemas and on DVD.Mr Thompson said: “You used to go to movies in these big picture palaces, but they have been divided up into these multiplexes.

“At the same time, you are getting HDTV and bigger [TV] screens and home viewing is more available to more people as prices go down.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• DVD

• Oscars

• Bollywood

Editor's choice

• The End: the worst movie endings ever
• Introducing The Times Proms Podcast
• Heath Ledger tipped for Oscar