Vizumi has just announced a new download service for the UK, one that features films to rent, buy and even download for free, and this isn't a small offer of a couple of free titles, it features a huge amount of free films.

Vizumi is backed by Arts Alliance Media who also distribute to LOVEFiLM, a site that powers a lot of other rental sites itself. The press release today tells us that Twentieth Century Fox have just signed up to distribute films through the site, and that means a whole heap of cracking titles.

I took a wonder over the site and discovered that Today's Free Films offers such titles as 2001 A Space Odyssey, Before Sunrise, Blazing Saddles, Jason and the Argonauts, The Dirty Dozen, and even X-Men.

You can download these in the high quality versions with the super high quality costing around £3.49, the standard cost for the high quality films are somewhere from £2.49 to £2.99 for a rental.

Other titles available are diverse as 36 Quai Des Orfevres, Blood Diamond, Lady Vengeance, the original Japanese Grudge series, Mystic River, Notes on a Scandal, Red Road, The Lost Boys, The Pursuit of Happyness and so on.

Right now you need Windows and Windows Media Player to see the films, and they make no mention of Windows Vista, just XP and NT, and all it takes is a quick install of the download manager software and you're away.

It seems a great step in the right direction, and it's a service I'm going to leap into try out this week. I'll report back once I have. Has anyone else used this service? Is it something you are likely to get into? It certainly seems that the studio's are, and this is perhaps the strongest message to date that they are going to take downloading seriously and treat it as a relevant business model.