In what has to be one of the stranger product announcements of recent times, Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS) said on Monday morning that it is releasing a suite of video apps for its Nook and Nook Color tablets. In June the company said that it would stop manufacturing the tablets on its own, but that the devices would be co-branded with an unnamed third-party. B&N still has not attached a name to that manufacturer.

Apparently the gimmick is that owners of devices from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and devices that use the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will be able to download the app and watch movies and other videos from the Nook Video store. Exactly why anyone would want to do that is a bit unclear.

Apple, Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) all offer the same service in one form or another, and from the B&N press release there simply does not appear to be any advantage to the Nook video app. The company is even late to Ultraviolet, a movie and TV industry format that allows customers to store videos they own in the Internet cloud and to play them back on any device. Amazon announced its compatibility with the Ultraviolet standard back in January.

B&N does plan to continue developing its e-readers, but that is a niche market that is getting smaller all the time. Having missed just about every train that has pulled out of the consumer electronics station so far, B&N looks deader and deader. The company reports second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, and consensus estimates call for an earnings per share loss of $0.74 on revenues of $1.32 billion. Just matching those estimates would be a victory of sorts for the company.

Shares are down about 3.8% this morning, at $16.88 in a 52-week range of $11.17 to $23.71.

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