Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) may have taken a while to release a set-top box to let consumers download movie rentals from the web to their television, but according to the Dallas Morning News its working with partner Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to develop more services to allow people to watch films on mobile devices. The new services will be built on top of Microsoft’s new software platform Live Mesh, which uses internet connections to share data among different gadgets. Live Mesh currently allows Microsoft programs to talk to one another, but the software giant says it will eventually support Macs and Windows Mobile smart phones.

Blockbuster has been interested in letting consumers view movies on their mobile for some time now. The movie rental firm’s chairman and chief executive Jim Keyes has said he downloads movies from the store’s online service to a storage card that then gets inserted into his Blackberry. The challenge, though, was making it convenient for users. You can see how it would make a lot of sense to give users a way to share the movie they’ve downloaded from the new set-top box, for example, onto a mobile phone. But despite the upbeat tone of the story, this is all still theoretical stuff for the company. Blockbuster CIO Keith Morrow said eventually the company “wanted” to give customers access to “any movie on any device” with an internet connection and a screen. But even in the short term, Morrow was careful to use the word “could.” For example, in a possible more immediate application, Blockbuster “could” use the technology to let travellers download movies from Blockbuster kiosks to their portable media players. He did not confirm if this was actually in the works. Other ideas being bounced around include using Live Mesh to allow a person to pause a movie on one TV and pick it up at the same exact place the show left off in another building and a system that would let parents know if their kids were trying to watch a movie during homework time.

• Blockbuster Planning Mobile Movie Development With Handset Makers