VHX announces one-page purchasing

Update.

Technically Brooklyn linked earlier this week to a sneak peak on Tumblr where VHX showed a GIF of a purchasing screen coming out on the same page as the preview of a movie. We read this to mean that you could post something like a YouTube’esque preview, but also buy the movie within the field that embedded video occuppied.

We wrote about VHX’s $3.2 million investment, led by Union Square Ventures, in September.

Our guess wasn’t quite right. The feature has now been announced, and VHX has built a way to overlay purchasing activity on top of any webpage. If you’re using a VHX based webpage, it’s already built in to your site. If you’re not, if you add a bit of javascript to your site and it will work. More on how.

The new feature also permits user customization.

Filmmakers who have built their own sites don’t have to migrate to VHX to use the feature. This should work on any site at all. In fact, it would even work on sites with no affiliation to the film in question or VHX (though the payment would still go to the filmmaker via VHX). Technically Brooklyn could start enabling sales of VHX videos here and now if we added the Javascript to our site.

That said, the new feature does not overlay an embedded video, it overlays the whole webpage. So it’s not quite at the point where fans could embed your trailer on their Facebook page and their friends could buy the movie there, but it does keep potential buyers from moving to a new page once they’ve found you, which should improve sales.

Also, no effort is made to get you to create an account before buying and there’s a link to PayPal, if you prefer that method. Kudos for both.