or clients in the multi-billion dollar motion picture market. Not only is it an exciting business of telling stories that touch the minds, hearts and lives of millions of people, it can also be a profitable business for those who approach it intelligently.
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You will be able to visit the set, receive tickets to the premiere, have your name in the movie s credits and much more. This is truly a once From:
Sure, you've gone to YouTube and watched that occasional, amusing, few-minute-long video whose URL a friend emailed you. But what if you're in the mood for something longer and at a better picture quality?
We took five services offering just that out for a spin: CinemaNow, MovieFlix, Movielink, Amazon's Unbox, and Starz's Vongo. Each has a somewhat different take on what your online movie downloading experience should be. They vary in what they offer, how you should pay, and whether you subscribe to a film library, rent, or purchase the content.
The service offers a nice selection of free movies. And CinemaNow claims more than 4,000 feature-length films, television programs, and music concerts from licensors such as 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lionsgate, MGM, Miramax, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, Sundance Channel, and Warner Bros. Since the service includes adult content, it also provides parental controls.
CinemaNow requires Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 10 or higher, but you don't have to download a separate catalog/player application to use it. It does require you to install an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer to play movies, however.
CinemaNow's site has a pretty thorough page on to see the movies on a bigger screen, but we still had to purchase a to get our laptop to talk to our HDTV-ready TV understandably.
Free
Free movies come from independent sources rather than the big movie studios, and they are stream-only. The Free area is very accessible and well organized, but you won't find many movies you've even heard of in there. Surprisingly, the Foreign movie section has more choices than you'll find in the more-expensive "Rent" or "Subscription," options, and there isn't even a Foreign genre choice for "Buy" or "Burn to DVD.
" We found a couple of very enjoyable but relatively unknown pictures you can watch on a shoestring. Free movies stream at your choice of 300Kb/s or 700Kb/s, neither delivers spectacular quality, but the 700K option was watchable on a non-huge screen. It would be nice to be able to search by picture quality i.
e., bitrates from 300 to 1500K. You may only be interested in titles that will look good on a bigger television.
The CinemaNow video player uses Windows Media Player behind the scenes when you're in the small ActiveX control, and overtly when you view in full screen. During fast panning scenes, we could see the jitter of lost frames. And when watching the free 2004 comedy Baptists at Our Barbecue, this occurred sometimes, but mostly the picture was perfectly watchable.
We did run into one problem of the image going upside-down, and then the window closing, but that may have been related to turning of hardware acceleration in order to take screen captures for this article.
Subscribe
Subscription selections weren't much hotter than the free ones, though you don't have to put up with the annoying ads as you do if you're watching free movies. Subscribing gives you access to more films, but they're still not top Hollywood releases and most are quite low-budget.
Subscription also lets you download as many movies as you want. At the medium bitrate of 700K the highest allowed for "subscribe" movies we saw some banding, but the picture was usually better than VHS. A company rep told us that picture quality was often related to the quality of the print supplied to CinemaNow by the studios.
Renting and Buying Movies in CinemaNow Rental gets you better picture quality for some titles that offer Premium 1500K download bitrate more film choices, and more up-to-date and in-demand movies. Renting doesn't require you to pay a monthly subscription, and fees for individual movies start at 49 cents, but you won't find hit films at that price, those usually cost $3.99 or sometimes $2.
99. Some categories have even less choice than the Free movies: in Foreign there was only one page of six films to choose from, whereas under Subscription there were three pages of choices. In general, you won't find anywhere near as many choices of movies to rent as you would on Netflix or at your local video store.
But if it's raining, you're far from a store, and you don't want to wait for the Netflix package in the mail, renting this way is a viable option. At the time of review, the movie Little Miss Sunshine was a new release on Netflix, but wasn't available as a rental on CinemaNow; it was available to buy for $14.95 however.
Some titles in this section are only available in 700K, medium bitrate. For that, we'd expect them to be included among the Subscription choices rather than costing the extra rental fee. And some of the categories aren't exactly apt: Would you consider Ghostbusters II to belong in "Classics.
" We guess they include any movie older than ten years a "classic."
When you first download a Rent movie, you hit Rent Now and then get a checkout page. When you actually start downloading the film, you have to pick a directory to save the movie file too something not very well explained in the software.
The page for the movie we chose said it was a premium 1500K version, but when we actually paid and downloaded it, it turned out to be 1200K. The file format is WMV, and we could start watching it after about 15 minutes of downloading; it would have been quicker with a connection faster than our 150KB/sec DSL. Once you first click Watch Now, you have 24 hours to complete your viewing.
Doing so launches whatever app is registered to play WMP files, in our case Winamp, which actually reported a bitrate of 1299K.
Be warned that you can only watch Rented movies on one PC; we made the mistake of downloading a Rent movie to an office PC, thinking we could continue watching it at home after logging in to the same account. Since we paid to watch the movie within 24 hours, we'd expect to be able to do so from anywhere we had web access.
In any case, we can report that the picture quality was excellent at 1200K on a 19-inch 1280x1024 LCD.
Buying Movies
This is where you pay usually $14.95 (older titles for $9.
95, super in-demand ones for $19.95) to download a movie for keeps. A feature-length film takes about an hour to download over a fast connection.
You can watch the movie while it downloads (after 10 percent or so of the movie's been downloaded) and view it while you're offline.
The movie choices were quite up to date in this section: At the time of review, Jackass Number 2 and Little Miss Sunshine were available those titles were also new releases on Netflix. CinemaNow has deals with Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, and Warner Brothers to get this content more sources than other internet movie download sites.
File size for bought movies is about 1.5GB, with encoding rates of 1200K to 1500K; most we saw here were 1200K.
An important difference between Buy and Rent is that when you Buy, you can watch the movie on more than one PC.
Burning DVDs
CinemaNow claims to be the only site that lets you burn Hollywood content. Downloading a movie for burning to DVD gets you the highest quality image. To download a movie for burning to DVD, you first have to download the 12MB DVD burning software.
The burn feature has that telltale little "beta" tag, so the company seems to be covering themselves in case the feature doesn't work quite right.
You can also play DVD from your HD without burning. When we did this, it tried to play in Windows Media Player, but you need DVD Decoder plugin to do so.
These cost $15 to $20 to download.
After a couple of DVD blanks were rejected, we got CinemaNow to successfully burn a DVD, which did, as advertised, include the menus and special features, and was playable on our normal DVD player.
But the picture quality was not first-rate DVD quality.
MovieFlix MovieFlix offers a large collection of free and subscription movies, but no top current blockbusters.
Most of the films are a bit faded around the edges, but at the cheapest monthly fee of any service we reviewed, you can still find some enjoyable entertainment here. MovieFlix has no player/manager software that you need to download. It relies on its web site and RealPlayer to get you the movies you want.
(And this reviewer ain't a big fan of Real's many popups, messages, calls home, and other baggage.) If you pay the $7.95 monthly membership fee, you can also use Windows Media Player, though we couldn't get WMP to find the MovieFlix server, even after allowing it access in our firewall.
And the MovieFlix help on the topic "please make sure your Windows Media Player is properly installed" was no help at all. An attempt on another computer at a different location, too, couldn't play the WMP version, stating the file type or codec wasn't supported.
Unlike any of the other services here, there's no download video rental: It's purely streaming.
One nice thing over some of the other services is that you can fast forward and use the progress indicator to position your place in the film right away, without waiting for the entire movie to download.
The MovieFlix site is somewhat less sophisticated than the other services reviewed here, with a large field of genres to pick from, and when you click on one or search, you get an alphabetical text and link list, without thumbnails. You can search, but there's no Advanced Search as in CinemaNow, which lets you specify genre and such.
You can, however sort the list by Year, Length, and whether the title requires membership.
When we say that the films are not major movies, we're talking about titles like the animated Aquarium of the Aliens and lots of stuff you haven't heard of from the 1930s to 1960s. And even pictures listed under "Member Favorites" had titles like Son of the Sheik and Zoltan Hound of Dracula.
Parental controls seem limited to a "Family Filter," which you can turn on and off. We couldn't even find help on the site about how to actually prevent anyone from just turning it back off if you've set it on.
The streams we viewed were coming in at 200Kbps and 225Kbps lower than any other service, but that's one price you pay for instant gratification: Most of the other services make you wait ten minutes or so while the beginning of the film is downloading.
This bitrate of MovieFlix doesn't lend itself to even a full-screen viewing on a 19-inch display, let alone a large television. -- start ziffarticle //-->MovieFlix doesn't offer in-demand recent movie hits, nor the ability to download films for rent or purchase, but for a quick entertainment fix, you can't beat the price.
As you might expect for such a bare-bones service, there's no support for portable devices, or even for offline viewing.
Vongo Vongo boasts over 2000 titles, but just over 100 available for rental.
A big difference between this service and is that Vongo doesn't offer any way to permanently own a movie or burn it to a DVD.
It also doesn't have any free movies; you either subscribe for $9.95 per month or rent individual titles. You can sign up as either a Registered User or as a Member.
Registering without membership entitles you to see what films are available to watch previews, rate films, and download Pay-per-view content. The $9.95/month Membership lets you fully use the service, giving you lots of included movies provided by Starz Entertainment and also gets you Starz's channel streaming.
It also lets you watch movies on three separate devices.
The service requires you to download a software client that will let you select the movies you want to watch. A nice touch in this nicely designed application is that it will play the preview of any movie you're interested in.
It also (below the preview) shows you the download file size and format. But it doesn't tell you the bitrate, which determines the picture quality. You can download movies immediately or schedule them to download at any hour of the day.
The service only lets you have 10 content files on your HD at a time, and you have 10 days to view content; pay-per-view selections must be watched within one 24-hour period.
You can also enter a Parental control password, but PG-13 and R and above are the only choices for control; CinemaNow offers more flexibility in this area. We noticed that our example recent releases, Jackass Number 2 and Little Miss Sunshine were not available on Vongo, so the content is limited by what's available to Starz.
We did find some older mainstream flicks: Pretty Woman and Sleepless in Seattle, for example. And The Da Vinci Code, a recent release, was available in Pay-per-view.
The search only had four category listings: Action, Anime, Comedy, and Drama far fewer than available on some of the other services.
The browsing panel adds Kids Family, Romance, Sci-Fi Horror, and Starz Channel to that list.
Blowing this view up to full screen still doesn't allow fast forward or reverse, and the progress bar slider can't be used to advance or put back your position in the movie until after the whole movie has been downloaded. Your only choices are pause and stop.
The resolution (as determined by opening the WMA file in the Vongo directory and playing a movie in Winamp) was 720x390 at a bitrate of 1395K for one film we downloaded, and the picture quality was quite satisfying. But we still saw banding in other movies, even on a 19-inch LCD. Another minor detractor from the cinematic experience was the intermittently appearing Starz logo in the lower-right hand corner of the screen.
We think the subscription choice in Vongo, at only $9.99 a month is the better way to go if you're interested in this service, with its slick player/downloader software.
The number of titles included with the subscription is plentiful enough to keep you entertained for many hours. We think it would have been nice for Vongo to throw in a few free movies, as CinemaNow and MovieFlix do.
-- end ziffarticle //-->
Movielink Movielink has a good selection of recent titles it should, as it's a joint venture of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. It doesn't require subscription fees and offers movies just two ways: Rent or Purchase. There's no subscription option and no monthly charge, but you have to register (which you can even do without a credit card, similar to CinemaNow).
Renting works similarly to , while Purchasing lets you keep the movie but not burn it to DVD format.
You can burn the movies to disk in WMF format. Some movies will only be available as purchases and others as rentals, depending on what the distribution gods of Hollywood have deemed allowable. Most purchase movies we saw went for $9.
99, but some were as high as $19.99; rentals were mostly $2.99 or $3.
99. Some of the purchased movies seemed overpriced at $9.99 old movies you could find in the bargain bin for less at the video store.
But we actually got a deal when renting: The movie we saw listed as a $2.99 rental, but turned out to only cost $1.19 at checkout!
And we found top current films e.g., Superman Returns that turned out to cost half to rent than the catalog page showed.
For rented movies, you have 30 days to watch within one 24-hour period after download. As with the other services, you can start watching a movie even before you've finished downloading it, but the Manager started out a bit optimistic, reporting that we'd be able to watch in 2 minutes, only to later revise that to 17 minutes. It depends on whether you're using your internet bandwidth for other tasks.
Movielink offers a few free sample movies to give you a taste of what to expect. Like Vongo, the service uses client software, Movielink Manager, which you download before watching your first film. It's a very quick download and install, though Media Player update downloads made it a bit longer of a process for us, with three restarts required (though one should be blamed on WMP alone).
As to picture quality, the Movielink site explains, "For most movie downloads, Movielink uses a minimum encode rate of 1.3 Mbps and a peak of 4 Mbps, with sound encoded at 96kbps. Movielink movie downloads are provided in letterbox format, with an array of approximately 150,000 pixels For the streaming previews, Movielink uses a constant bit rate (CBR) encoding of 300 kbps.
The 1.3 Mbps movie download file contains more visual information than the 300 kbps streamed movie file and is therefore of better quality." DRM prevented us from viewing content in WinAmp, so we can't verify this.
As with Vongo, Movielink movies can also be downloaded for PMC (Windows Portable Media Center) devices. Unlike Vongo, the Manager software doesn't also serve as the catalog of films, so of course doesn't preview the movies unless you specifically download a preview.
Movielink doesn't appear to have any parental controls.
There are ample genres to choose from: Foreign was even broken down into 12 countries plus "other," though there weren't a ton of films in each of these subcategories to choose from.
We like using MovieLink, its picture quality was very pleasing, software worked well and clearly, and it offers a good selection of recent titles to choose from.
Amazon.com's Unbox Amazon's video download service the newest of the services here, launched in Fall 2006 claims to give you web-delivered DVD-quality video that's as easy as taking a disc out of a box.
Unbox offers TV shows and movies for download and rental. The selection of over 2400 movies includes recent popular DVD releases. TV shows are $1.
99, movie rentals are mostly $3.99, and movie purchases are about $15. The service requires you to download the Unbox video player (a 3.
8 MB download), which installs .Net Framework 2.0 the service requires Windows XP.
You can set this application up on multiple PCs and share videos through Amazon's RemoteLoad system. There's very thorough Help on the site for all of this setup. The player has three panels: one for your video library, one for actually playing videos, and one for hooking up remote devices.
As you'd expect from an internet shopping powerhouse like Amazon, the categorization and recommendation features top the pack. Getting a movie into your player is smooth no figuring out which directory you should save it in. While a movie is downloading, you can pause it from the notification icon in the desktop tray if you need bandwidth for other actions.
Movies take between 20 minutes and an hour to download, depending on the speed of your broadband connection (and of course the length of the film).
Movies you've bought or rented appear in the right pane of the player. We successfully used RemoteLoad to download the movie we bought, SuperMan Returns, to another PC, which, as it was our workplace PC, the faster download speed meant we could start watching the movie after just a couple minutes.
There's also a web page version of your library.
Though the 2.5Mb/sec bitrate of movies downloaded from Unbox is about half that of actual DVDs, the service uses the codec that powers HD-DVD content.
And indeed the picture quality we got with Unbox was the closest to DVD quality of any of the services we reviewed.
The movie player lets you fast forward and rewind even before the whole movie's been downloaded, using these controls, which autohide at the bottom of full screen play.
Unbox had the broadest claims for support of portable devices, including for most Plays for Sure certified video devices, with a link to a page listing such .
The player's tab for devices is also well thought out. You just drag the movie from the left to the center panel in the Devices tab. -- start ziffarticle //-->We found Unbox to be one of the best services we tested, in terms of ease of use, content selection, and picture quality. It takes somewhat different skills than opening a DVD box, but it really isn't that much more difficult an operation. -- end ziffarticle //-->
Sure these services will save you a trip to the local video store or a wait for DVDs in the mail, but downloading a movie will take at least an hour chances are you could get a DVD at the local video store faster. The selection of movies and picture quality isn't yet near what you get with Netflix or the brick-and-mortar video rental store. The average bitrate for a DVD is 5Mb/sec, compared with the best bitrate found in these services, Movielink's 1.
3Mb/sec; most of the others were much lower.
Unless your internet connection is a T3 or better, you don't want to be doing too much on the internet besides downloading and watching your movie: It uses up all the bandwidth you can give it. Of course, there's always the chance your Internet connection gets interrupted in the middle of your watching a movie, though most of these services require a large prebuffer before letting you start viewing.
But the point is, the faster your internet connection, the better prepared you are for using these services. Another consideration is that videos in excess of an hour of playtime take up some serious disk space; you'll want a fairly beefy hard disk if you plan on storing multiple movies this way.
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