Reuters reports that the U.S. movie rental chain Blockbuster has acquired the film download service, Movielink. While the terms of the deal are undisclosed, it’s thought that the purchase price is significantly less than the 50 million price tag that was banded about when negotiations began last March.

The U.S.-only movie download store was launched in 2002 as a joint venture between Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. and MGM — giving it access to major Hollywood content. With the acquisition, Blockbuster is inheriting those licensing agreements and a back catalog of more than 3,300 downloads. According to the report, Blockbuster will continue to operate Movielink as a separate brand, but will eventually make elements of the service available through Blockbuster.com.

Movielink is a standard Windows DRM affair, with movie downloads offered for both rental and to-own. Rentals can be stored for up to 30 days and expire 24 hours after the first viewing. In some cases, downloads can be played back on up to three PCs — depending on the original content-owners’ wishes — while others are limited to one PC.

Earlier in the week NewTeeVee published a short post referencing a story being carried in a Spanish newspaper, which suggested that a number of local broadcasters were considering taking legal action against the Internet TV startup, Zattoo.

Zattoo, is a peer-to-peer application that provides live streaming of traditional TV channels (see our review). The service is ad-supported, where an advertisement is displayed for 5 seconds every time a user switches channel, and this appears to be the potential cause of dispute, with some of Spain’s television stations unhappy that Zattoo is profiting from their content.

Zattoo (see our review) is one of only a few Internet TV applications that I use on an almost daily basis. It enables me to watch live television — which includes all of the BBC’s offerings along with a few other European channels — in a window in the corner of my laptop, while I remain productive: blogging, replying to or writing email and chatting over IM. In this way, Zattoo is pitched very differently to competitors such as Joost or Babelgum, both of which attempt to re-create part of the “lean-back” experience of traditional TV.

I caught up with two of Zattoo’s co-founders (via email), Sugih Jamin and Beat Knecht, to find out more about the company’s mission and its Silicon Valley-esque roots in academia.

Digital Spy are reporting that Watch India, a subscription-based Internet TV channel with a focus on Indian programing, has been a great success: “In its first month, it managed 100,000 unique viewers, with over 33,000 coming from the UK alone.”

Watch India has a particularly strong position regarding its appeal to ex-pat Indians. While I have no knowledge of the availability of good Indian television content outside of India, it’s likely that by offering programs direct, Watch India can provide a wider range of content — including more recent productions — than that the limited offerings of cable or satellite television. If the programming on Watch India can mirror content “back home”, and offer it worldwide, then I can only see its popularity growing, and also the possibility of other foreign language TV portals being developed.