Slashdot Mirror
Hollywood Backs Swedish Movie Streaming Site
paulraps writes "Forget Spotify and Skype: the latest strangely-named-but-hey-it's-free service from Sweden offers users streamed on-demand movies free of charge, has deals with two major Hollywood studios, and is called Voddler. Since its launch two weeks ago, the service has signed up a quarter of a million users and has almost the same number queuing for an invitation. After signing deals with Disney and Paramount, the company provides access to thousands of films, which are shown uninterrupted after a barrage of ads. The target is the file-sharing generation: 'Our customers can be sure that Voddler is totally legal, secure, and that there are no risks of computer viruses infecting their machines from downloaded files,' says executive vice president Zoran Slavic."
I have been using voddler as a beta tester for a few weeks now and it works quite ok after the last client upgrade. The first mac client was crap, nothing happened when I tried to login and it went fullscreen mode when started plus the program froze so I had to shut down the computer with forced shut down. After the latest client version I was logged in when I started the program, Voddler client is built on XBMC Media Center and you can only use the keyboard to navigate which can be quite annoying when navigating.
Browsing the few movies they have at the moment is fairly easy (only about 500 movies or so). First I get a commercial and then the movie plays nicely on just 10-12Mbit adsl line. I have heard that there was commercial breaks in the movies, but I haven't seen any commercial in a movie so far, just the commercial just before the movie starts which can be 10 minutes long or so.
For a beta I think it's a nice product which works quite well for me. Especially since the last update on the client which allows you to go into windowed mode which I forgot to mention further up in my text.
I believe that Voddler can be great once the new movies pop in and the beta goes into full product. The client has only crashed on me once and when I started it up again and found my movie I was looking at I could start where it ended.
Do I need to pay for Voddler? You will have the choice of advertised movies and pay per view. In the beta version only advertised movies are available.