Which Movie Download Site Is Best?

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has reviews today of five internet movie download and rental services. The services/sites — CinemaNow, MovieFlix, Movielink, Amazon's Unbox, and Starz's Vongo — have various takes on how online feature-length films should be made available over the internet. CinemaNow has the most alternatives: Free, Subscription, Rent, Buy, and Burn to DVD, while the others offer some subset of these choices. Amazon Unbox has the best video quality, using a 2.5Mb/sec bitrate and VC1 encoding, while CinemaNow is the only one that lets you burn DVDs. There are still disadvantages to getting movies this way, but VOD is making headway, as these services show."

Comments

This article...

[Anonymous Coward]

...sounds like an advertisement for some online video download service called CinemaNow. I wonder, considering the number of ways and option to burn to DVD this service has, whether CinemaNow is really just a front for a the biggest movie houses? Does anyone know what connections to the industry CinemaNow has?

Which one meets my needs?

[TheRaven64]

Which one give me the following?

1. No DRM.
2. Available in the UK.
3. Fixed rate up to 30-per-month downloads.

I don't have the disk space or the inclination to archive every film I download - most I only want to watch anyway - but I do want the option to transcode it to something I can watch on a portable device of my choice for when I'm travelling. I can't do this with DRM, so it's simply not an acceptable option.

Until a company starts caring more about the service they provide to their paying customers than about the spectre of piracy, they won't have my business.

Re:Which one meets my needs?

[Znork]

"DRM means no studio support"

And DRM means no money, as the end users will get the non-DRM'ed versions elsewhere instead.

"You can't produce a film in your basement"

Well, true, you need a kitchen, a livingroom and five PC's (see Star Wreck) :). Seriously tho, it's on the verge of becoming debatable; the cost of high quality effects, bluescreen tech and quality recording and editing capacity is plummeting. And actors have never been particularly rare (see any local theatre or dozen).

That aside; if you instead compare with TV financing schemes, you get a vastly different equation. If $30 per month can finance a whole load of channels sending non-stop things I'm not watching anyway, why would paying $10 per month for a select number of shows be untenable?

Xbox Live

[elrous0]

While I understand that this article was talking about SITES, I would like to mention the new Xbox Live service as well. True high definition movies, TV shows, reasonable prices, and they play on your TV (no sitting in front of a computer screen or trying to reencode them for DVD).

The only big downsides are:

• The 360's small hard drive--Come one MS, what's with the increasingly bizarre delay on what should be a simple matter--releasing a REAL hard drive (120 GB+)? You promised it over a year ago. Just how hard is it?
• Movies are rental-only probably related to the small hard drive, anyway.

-Eric

USA + Windows only services?

[Yvan256]

Do any of these services work on OS X and are available to Canadians?

I'm getting tired of companies that think "world = USA + Windows".

Apple's iTV

[goombah99]

The so-called iTV according to one rumor site will have the following features:

1) you can download movies in high res
2) watch them on the TV
3) Burn them to DVD one time
4) You can keep the digital copy on your hard drive as long as you want, but it will only play on that machine (or iTV)

plus you can play a normal DVD you rented on your mac and your iTV will tivo it for viewing later after you return the disk. You cannot reburn these or move them to another machine but you can view them later on that machine.

that seems pretty fair. it basically gives you all the capability and ownership rights you have now with physical media but it does not aid in piracy. If so once again apple will get it right.

Re:depends

[cursorx]

There are private torrent trackers around that specialize in alternative, non-mainstream and older movies. They're often almost as slow as ed2k, though, but the community is a nice plus.