When not bawdlerizing movies or trying, and failing, to kill Netflix, Blockbuster has been busy planning to develop and ship a set-top box that will allow customers to download movies at home. The company purchased online movie download service Movielink for $6.6 million last August. But it still hasn't integrated Movielink into Blockbuster.com after seven months. The chances they can come out with an inexpensive, easy-to-use hardware device in the foreseeable future seems slim — look for the company to partner with or acquire an existing manufacturer, such as struggling startup Vudu. (Photo by AP/Ron Heflin)

Viacom is determined not to fall into the music industry's technophobic trap. Instead, it's embracing the online-video frenzy by releasing Jackass 2.5 directly onto the Web next week. Initially offered as a free streamed video on Blockbuster's Movielink, it will eventually move to pay outlets like iTunes and, yes, DVD — which is where this on-the-cheap knockoff probably would have landed just a couple years ago.

Here's what no one's saying about Blockbuster's acquisition of Movielink, the Hollywood-backed movie-download site: It's a desperate move to shore up Blockbuster's online failures. Blockbuster, remember, has been promising video downloads for most of this decade. First came a deal with Enron's broadband division, and, well, we all know what happened there. Since then, Blockbuster has said that video downloads would be coming soon for years. But Hollywood studios, burned by past negotiations with Blockbuster for sharing video rental fees, are understandably loath to cut favorable online deals with the video-rental chain. And it's hard for Blockbuster to compete technologically with the likes of Apple, Amazon.com, and Netflix. Buying Movielink gets Blockbuster deals with studios and ready-made tech — all of which gives it merely a place at the online-video table, not the ability to eat everyone else's lunch.