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MovieLink 2004's Top Film Download Service, So Far
An anonymous reader writes "The NPD Group has released some research on the fledgling pay digital movie download services. Numbers for the first half of this year show MovieLink as number one with a third of total users followed by MovieFlix with 13% of the market. It's a very small market though, with purchases equalling only 0.3% of the total movie market (and nowhere near the numbers of those trading on the free P2P services). Also of note, 80% of users are male and the top films purchased are sci-fi and fantasy."
Its not the services that are illegal, its what everyone's doing on them.
A blog about stuff.
The other 20% are called females. I know, they're not something most people on Slashdot aware of, but they really should be.
They're probably trying to install Gator onto my machine anyways...
You got that right!
"Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading source for movies delivered directly over the internet. We want you to enjoy our powerful movie download experience, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States"
What a extremely helpfull site, can't even browse the bloody thing!
And the above is when I tried to access movielink.com directly
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Pay anywhere between $1.99 and $4.99 so that you can use your own bandwidth to download a movie. You have ONE 24 hour window to watch the movie. You can't burn it to DVD. You have to pay to watch it again after the window is over.
Netflix is a better deal.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I assumed that mlDonkey version you speak of is for Linux, but if not here goes:
Try Starz! on Demand, it's a subscription based service that lets you download hundreds of movies a month. Basically every movie shown on Starz is available for download. Plus you can watch Starz.
Bad thing: It uses Helix, RealPlayer's DRM technology and last time I checked wasn't available for Linux (hmmm... I wonder why). Requires substantial bandwidth. Can't keep the movies, they expire after 2 weeks.
Good thing: It's a good service, good movies and good quality too, at about 500 MB per movie. Good for someone like me who doesn't want to pay for cable or satellite, but will pay for a nice movies.
I used the trial and stuck with it because it allowed me to watch a movie a day, when I wanted to.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I've watched 3 movies so far and even though the regular prices are too high [but if you go through real.movielink.com they have a small number of movies $1 every week, which is how I watched mine], the limitations (24h after first view, IE, windows, etc...) are painful,... It does work suprisingly well.
I have a 100inches front projection home theater and it looks almost as good as a good DVD, and the files are only ~540Mb(*)... They must be using some pretty powerful codecs (better than dvd's mpeg2)
*: Or twice that for the "EQ" (higher quality) but again, standard quality was actually pretty good
Just my experience
I downloaded a couple of movies from movielink only because they were free when signing up for crappy sbc dsl. Movielink installs a proprietary "downloader." This downloader connects to their database when watching the movie, I guess to verify download date and if it has been watched. I tried to watch my movie with allowing it to connect to the internet and it was a no go.
(E) TVs typically have better resolution then computer screens, and movie watching is often a "family" event. Thus it makes more sense for most people to download movies on to your TV then on to your computer.
Incorrect, the exact opposite is true. Standard NTSC is only 720x480 and that is what is stored on dvd's. While there is HDTV which gets up into higher resolutions that's far rarer than people with 1600x1200 on their monitor. So I'd heavily disagree on TV's typically having better resolution. Now if you really meant screen SIZE that'd be rather different, most TV's have a much larger physical screen size.
(C) though is a perfectly good point. Most of the movies I saw on the site were going for about $4-5 and was a 500mb file size. So definately these video's will be lower quality then the dvd's you could rent, but possibly similar quality to vhs. Of course an action flick will look a lot worse crammed to this size. I'd rather just spend the extra effort to go rent a dvd or just buy it outright.
Flat rate services generally have problems with their models. They never seem to suspect that once unlimited anything is available to their clients, they often start pushing those unlimits.
Netflix in particular quietly stiffs their customers who try to take full advantage of their supposedly unlimited rentals. Sure, when you start out you're getting two sets of movies a week. But then gradually they start getting "sent" and "recieved" slower and slower, until you're getting only one or less. Mind you, this usually happens after you get a series of emails asking how many days it took to recieve your movies. If you ask about it, NF just blames the post office, although they have no explanation as to how the postal service could suddenly become slower for just your mail to and from Netflix, regardless of whether it was sent from your home, post office box, or post office itself. It couldn't be their fault - that would be false advertising.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Now I haven't touched WMP from a development perspective since Intertainer went away (2002), but I'll assume that things haven't changed. The WMP plugin sucks in everything but IE, the encryption never worked right in NS 4, and only recently became embedable on the Mac. I think the encryption is still for crap on the Mac.
Did that service happen to be the above mentioned service, Intertainer? That site was sweet, other than the shoddy video quality. But I am biased, I wrote 90%+ of the UI. ah, back when work was fun.