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Unified store for movies, music, apps coming to Windows 10 Technical Preview

Windows 7 desktop.
Mr.Follow/Windows Wikia
It might have launched in a rough state, but as Microsoft has continued to add improvements to the Windows 10 Technical Preview, it’s looking more likely that Windows 10 will be the most streamlined version of the operating system in recent memory. Much of this is the result of simplifying as much as makes sense, and this extends to the apps as well as the OS itself.

Until now, if you wanted to shop for videos, music, or apps, they were all to be found in separate stores. In an update currently rolling out, buying that content has gotten simpler — though the Music and Video apps that were added to the Windows 10 Technical Preview late last month are still how users will play back their content.

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A “Movies & TV” section was added to the Store beta last month, but no content was actually accessible. Microsoft turned the section on yesterday, with the full rollout expected to take roughly 24 hours. Once members of the Windows Insider program running the Technical Preview have received the update, they’ll be able to rent or purchase movies and TV shows from within the store app and play them in the Video Preview app.

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“The experience you will see today is unfinished and we have a lot more work to do,” Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc wrote on Blogging Windows. No cast and crew information is available, for example, and for now video playback is limited to streaming only. Offline download capability is on the way, LeBlanc wrote.

Music has yet to be added to the store beta, but will be added in the coming weeks. LeBlanc mentions that Microsoft will have much more to say about the Store beta at the company’s Build 2015 conference later this month.

For the full list of countries, as well as information on what to do if the Store app crashes after the update, see Microsoft’s blog post.

Kris Wouk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…
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