What Is Movies Anywhere? Here’s Why You Should Use It…

Movies Anywhere lets you watch your purchased digital movies in one place.

Wondering what Movies Anywhere is? I’ve gotten the question a lot recently, as its popularity seems to have grown exceptionally during the pandemic while the world was stuck in lockdown and people turned to buying digital movies in droves to keep themselves entertained.

This guide will give you a rundown of what Movies Anywhere is and why you should be using the service.

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What Is Movies Anywhere?

At its most basic, Movies Anywhere is a digital locker. That is a cloud-based service that lets you store your digital media. However, Movies Anywhere, as the name suggests, is for movies only. It’s not a cloud storage solution like Google Drive or OneDrive.

Movies Anywhere also doesn’t have any kind of front end that lets you drag and drop digital movie files from your hard drive into it so you can store them in the cloud.

Rather, Movies Anywhere is a digital locker that exists for your purchased movies from major digital movie stores. These include Movies Anywhere itself, where you can buy movies directly, as well as Apple’s iTunes Movie Store, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Microsoft, and a few more.

Movies Anywhere was originally a service owned by Disney before it rebranded in its current form and became the digital locker so many users love today.

So How Does Movies Anywhere Work, Exactly?

As already noted, as a digital locker, Movies Anywhere lets you store all your movies from myriad services in a single place. So say you buy Star Wars: A New Hope from iTunes and I Am Legend from Amazon Prime Video.

Before Movies Anywhere, if you wanted to watch those movies you would need to do so via the iTunes app and Amazon Prime Video app respectively. No matter if you wanted to watch them on your TV or smartphone, you’d need to open an app for each movie if you bought them in different stores. There was no one place you could see ALL your purchased movies from different stores on your device.

That’s what Movies Anywhere does: it lets you see all your movies from different stores in a single app–the Movies Anywhere app.

And this is true no matter which store you buy the movie from. In other words, you don’t need to buy a movie from the Movies Anywhere store to see it in the Movies Anywhere app. You can buy it from iTunes and as long as you have your Movies Anywhere account connected to your iTunes account, a few minutes after you purchase the movie on iTunes it will show up in your Movies Anywhere account as well.

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If I Use Movies Anywhere, Can I Still Watch Movies In The App I Bought Them From?

Yes. So say you buy I Am Legend from Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Prime Video is connected to your Movies Anywhere account. When you buy I Am Legend on Amazon Prime Video, you’ll be able to watch it there any time you want or you can watch it in the Movies Anywhere app itself.

Does Movies Anywhere Work With TV Shows & Series?

This is the only big omission from Movies Anywhere right now. As the name of the service suggests, it only works with actual movies. Movies Anywhere does not work with TV shows. So, if you’ve bought the complete series of Lost through iTunes, it will not show up in your Movies Anywhere. Only movies do.

Do All Studios Support Movies Anywhere?

So in order for Movies Anywhere to work both the studios and the digital storefronts need to agree to work with the service. The good news is virtually ALL of the major digital storefronts already work with Movies Anywhere (iTunes Movie Store, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Microsoft, etc).

The bad news is not every movie studio works with Movies Anywhere yet. The movie studios that do support Movies Anywhere include Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, Illumination Entertainment), Disney, Twentieth Century Studios, and Warner Bros.

Hopefully, other studio holdouts will support Movies Anywhere soon.

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Michael Grothaus

Apple expert and novelist, Michael Grothaus has been covering tech on KnowYourMobile for the best part of 10 years. Prior to this, he worked at Apple. And before that, he was a film journalist. Michael is a published author; his book Epiphany Jones was voted as one of the best novels about Hollywood by Entertainment Weekly. Michael is also a writer at other publications including VICE and Fast Company.