VIRGIN MEGASTORES AND TORNADO GROUP PLC LAUNCH DIGITAL DOWNLOADS ON VIRGIN.COM/MEGASTORES

21 June 2002

Tornado Group plc, Europe's leading Digital Service Provider, and Virgin Megastores, the premier High Street retailer of Entertainment products, announce today the launch of digital downloads on the Virgin Megastores UK website virgin.com/megastores/uk.

Tornado has provided Megastores with the technical infrastructure enabling them to offer digital content via their site, which allows consumers to download and purchase media content quickly and securely, whilst safeguarding the content owners intellectual property rights.

Tornado has a number of existing relationships with leading games publishers and together with Virgin Megastores, has been working to aggregate the right content for this important launch. The site currently offers consumers a range of computer game titles covering action, simulation, sports and strategy. Consumers download these digital games onto their computer with just a few clicks and can start game play almost immediately. The games currently available on the site are from various games publishers including iDigicon, Midas Interactive Entertainment, eJay and Small Rockets. Tornado and Virgin Megastores are continuing discussions with all the leading games publishers to increase the range of games titles available and are also in advanced negotiations with the major and independent record companies with a view to offering music on the site in the near future.

The technical infrastructure, on which the digital download area of the Virgin Megastores site sits, is Tornado's Complete E-Commerce Solution (CECS), a 'shop-in-a-box' application that provides Virgin Megastores with shopping cart functionality and credit card and pre-paid card processing. It has been fully customised to the branding and corporate identity of Virgin Megastores. The solution allows the website to be interfaced with Tornado's Secure Digital Delivery System (SDDS(tm)), which secures, stores and delivers the digital content. The content is protected against piracy using leading Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Fulfilment of the digital products to the consumer is undertaken by Tornado, which removes any download bandwidth from the retail site. Virgin Megastores has also contracted Tornado to provide customer service support to the consumers who download digital products from this site. Throughout the process, Tornado remains invisible to the end user.

"We're very pleased to be working with Tornado in a digital commerce arena, now we have the infrastructure in place we are looking forward to expanding our offering to our customers." Says Ian Heath, Head of Business Development for Virgin Megastores UK.

"Tornado's Secure Digital Delivery System is a proven, scalable and robust solution that can springboard digital product offerings from retailers and content owners to market quickly," says Neil Ferris, Managing Director of Tornado Group PLC. "The launch of virgin.com/megastores/uk is particularly noteworthy as it signifies the opportunity of incremental revenues for Virgin Megastores, Tornado and our content partners, in addition to fulfilling the consumer demand to access premium content online."