Motorola movie store is no more

Handset company quietly shut Paramount film service due to withdrawal from UIQ market.

Yesterday Samsung revealed the launch of its own UK movie store called Samsung Movies. This prompted discussion of the store that Motorola launched with Paramount last June.

Well, we've done a bit of digging and it turns out that the service was closed last November.

Motorola declined to comment on the story, but ME has seen documents which suggest that the reason for the closure was its withdrawal from Symbian/UIQ markets. It appears that Moto is now embracing Android, and that this does not support the movie store in its current form.

Common sense also suggests that Motorola's alarming decline in the handset market and its many redundancies must have played a part too: a movie store with a small niche audience can't be a priority when compared to reviving core device activities.

The store was originally designed for the MOTO Z10 handset, with other OMA DRM 2.0 compliant handsets to follow.