The cost of a television show could be as low as a dollar.

Rivals to follow?

Warner added that whether a TV show or feature film, it will only play on the initial computer used to make the download.

The downloads will not therefore work on other PCs or standard DVD players.

Other Hollywood studios are now likely to launch similar services.

They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.

Peer-to-peer connections enable people to quickly swap files between their computers without having to go via an internet server.