Is HMV an anomaly?

HMV recently announced that it had a great holiday season with year on year sales up in the region of 14.1% with strong performance across all digital media. Interesting that Waterstones performed less well with a year on year of 4.0%.

HMV has been active in developing its digital focus over the past year and this seems reflected in these results. Games and Movie DVDs were cited in the interview of the CEO on the Today programme.

This comes in the week where both Amazon and Apple place emphasis on developing a focus on distributing movies representing a challenge to this form of resurgence in times ahead. The fact that the games industry has managed to maintain a Platform based distribution model has provided some security for this form of channel, but one wonders for how long will this last?