For starters, I'm happy to report that, for the most part, there is hope for the future of movie downloads. While none of the companies get it exactly right, there are many things each one does satisfyingly well. In each case, for example, the quality of the downloaded film (filesize averaged about 1GB) was completely acceptable, with few if any artifacts or pixilation. If anything, the quality of the downloads may force you to re-think if your home computer equipment is up to snuff. It's akin to purchasing an HDTV and realizing you now need a better surround sound system.
Also startlingly acceptable across the board were the download speeds, with an average of 35-40 minutes to download a two-hour, 1GB movie via cable modem. As a movie and home theater lover, I, for one, was pleasantly surprised.
The current major players breakdown into two camps: browser-based (CinemaNow and Movielink) and application-based (iTunes and Vongo). The browser-based sites allow you to browse and order their content all from within the comfort of your browser window. When you're ready to download a movie, however, they ask you to install a download management application in order to monitor the secure download of their content. It's a quick application which installs and runs in a browser popup window (in the case of CinemaNow) or as a desktop application (in the case of Movielink) as the content is downloading. The application-based providers require their, typically larger, application software to be downloaded onto your PC. It acts as your interface to their movie catalog, your download manager and your library of content.
Regardless of the type of company (browser-based vs. application-based), we used the following criteria to evaluate the four offerings:
The Players
Let's start with the companies themselves…
CinemaNow
iTunes
Movielink
Vongo
So on to the important stuff…
Cost
CinemaNow offers the largest range of options, which is quickly apparent from the Buy, Rent, Burn-to-DVD, Free and Subscription tabs on its homepage. Movies are available for purchase for anywhere from $9.99 to $14.95. This'll get you a Windows Media Player file which you can play on up to three PCs. For about the same price you can choose the Burn-to-DVD option for certain titles. This option allows you to download a film and burn it directly onto a playable DVD (complete with cover art!). You can also rent films for up to $3.99 (some are as little as 50 cents!) for a 24-hour viewing period. The "Free" section gives you access to streaming video but the pickings are slim (think old war documentaries and episodes of animated shows you've never heard of).
For a monthly ($29.95) or yearly ($99.95) rate, you get unlimited access to their catalog of "non-premium" (re: non-Hollywood) videos, as well as unlimited minutes on their (ahem) "Mature content" website (for yearly subscribers only). Keep in mind, the cost to buy, rent and burn-to-DVD still applies for premium titles.
Movielink functions similarly to CinemaNow, but without the Free and Burn-to-DVD sections. Purchase prices range from $8.99 - $19.99 and rental prices range from $0.99 - $4.99. Movielink also allows for a quick "re-rent" at a nominal cost (usually $0.99). Movielink is strictly pay-per-view, there's no membership option.
The iTunes Movie store works just like the Music store, with content available only for purchase, no renting or streaming (or free stuff). You must create an Apple or AOL account, if you haven't already. New releases are priced at $12.99 when pre-ordered and during their first week of availability, and $14.99 thereafter. Other library titles are available for $9.99 every day.
Vongo sets itself apart from the competition with its subscription model; there's no purchasing on Vongo. It works like this: for $9.99 per month you get unlimited access that catalog of 2,000 movie and video titles (as well as access to stream the Starz TV channel). Just browse the catalog and download to your heart's (or hard drive's) content. Each title has an "available until" date (anywhere from 3 months to a year depending on the title) at which time the content you've downloaded will automatically expire.
Keep in mind, you still need to pay $3.99 to view certain "popular pay-per-view" titles. Meaning, the good stuff'll still cost ya. What Vongo calls "pay-per-view" titles are effectively rentals. You download a "pay-per-view" movie to your desktop where you can keep it for up to a month or until you start watching it, whichever comes first. Once you start watching it - just like the other services - you have 24 hours until the movie expires (anyone else feel like Jack Bauer?).
Each service offers a free-trial for about 7 to 14 days on average and each offers convenient gift cards so you can bequeath a film unto your favorite movie fan. Makes a great gift!
Selection
Across the board, the current selection of movies on all these services is slim. While numbers like 1500-4000 movies may sound like a lot, when you compare it with the number of movies out there, it's a drop in the well. I had a tough time even finding a movie with which to test out CinemaNow's Free area. I finally decided on old "Superman" cartoons. iTunes in particular has a surprisingly small selection of movies so far, most of them appearing on the Movie store homepage.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'm happy we're at the point that movies are being distributed online, but we have a long way to go before the online browsing experience mirrors that of a Netflix, Blockbuster or independent video store.
Interestingly, CinemaNow is the only company to offer an adult channel. Through a partnership with alladultchannel.com, which features a convenient single-sign-on, once you login to CinemaNow, you get access to the alladultchannel.com content. While this may be a story for another article, the adult film industry is known for being on the front-lines of digital media. This partnership is a smart move for CinemaNow.
Usability
With the exception of Vongo, the sites work like any other e-Commerce site: you browse, you fill your shopping cart, you checkout. That's when the downloading starts. Once you have the file downloaded, you play it in the company's player of choice. CinemaNow and Movielink use the native Window Media Player which offered a far smoother playback than iTunes' or Vongo's players (both skin Quicktime and WMP, respectively).
It takes some time to decipher CinemaNow's various download options in its tabbed interface (Buy, Rent, Burn-to-DVD, Free and Subscription). You need to search each section for a while to get an idea of the kind of content that's out there. While its QuickBrowse area offers an iTunes-like interface to browse content, its site search left a little to be desired (I couldn't find that "Superman" cartoon again, for example). As mentioned earlier, CinemaNow runs its download manager in a separate pop-up window.
The danger there is if you navigate away from that window - either by accident or by clicking on another icon that takes control of that window - you will terminate your download. Further, you can't add another movie to your CinemaNow downloader once you've kicked one off. You'll need to wait until the first one finishes before starting another.
Movielink is also browser-based, yet it solved the download management problem by installing an actual application that runs outside the browser and manages your downloads and your library.
While they separate the rental and purchase categories for some reason, the Movielink store interface is more streamlined and features clearer instructions than CinemaNow. There's nothing particularly fancy about Movielink, it's just a straight-on list of movies - which is exactly what you want. The site does feature some special offers ("X3" for $9.99) and there's also a $1.99 or less option, which is the equivalent of the discount rack at video store. Movielink is also the only service to offer live customer service.
Vongo and iTunes are able to streamline the searching and downloading process since they have their own desktop applications. After Vongo's 8-step (!) registration process, I was up and running. The Vongo application is sluggish and the interface takes some getting used to, but its download manager is very smart. It'll happily run in the background as a tray icon, and inform you of your download status.
Vongo's subscription model differs from the standard e-Commerce shopping cart experience. Once you're a Vongo member, you can browse the catalog, fill your library with whatever you feeling like watching (or however many titles your hard drive can handle) and let the downloading begin. The movies will stay on your hard drive until the "available until" date runs out (anywhere from 3 months to a year) at which time they will be automatically deleted. Naturally, if you go the "pay-per-view" route, there's that additional charge, and the movie expires after a month or 24 hours after you start watching.
Anyone familiar with the iTunes Music store (70% penetration, anyone?) will be able to pick up the Movie store instantly. Its movie browsing is smooth and simple to understand, using the standard iTunes play/pause buttons. Oddly, the cursor never changes to a hand when you hover over a clickable link, but that's not the end of the world. By default, iTunes downloads the movies to a subfolder called "movies" within your default music directory. For some reason, there's no way to set a directory specifically for movie downloading. That could get very annoying in the future and, hopefully, Apple will deal with that in a later release.
CinemaNow, Movielink and Vongo are all tied to the Windows platform and Windows Media Player 10. The Vongo interface itself is in essence a "skinned" WMP. iTunes is the only one of these options to support the Mac platform. iTunes also retains chapters very well in its player, a feature which is all but non-existent in the Windows Media Player options.
Speed/Quality
The movies on these services usually top out at about 1GB. Vongo is the only service to offer a "portable" option for downloading to Toshiba's excellent gigabeat portable media player. Choosing this option cuts the filesize in half while retaining good quality. Surprisingly, iTunes didn't offer a similar option for the ubiquitous iPod.
For testing purposes, I always tried to pick films that were around 100-120 minutes and contained some amount of visual flair so I could test the quality (though due to the limited selection, that was sometimes a problem).
For example:
On CinemaNow, a purchased copy of "Underworld: Evolution" downloaded in about 30 minutes on my cable modem! Conversely, downloading a rented "Hard Candy" took 8 hours over the same bandwidth (though after 4 hours, when it buffered 50%, I could start watching it). I'm not sure what the thought process is there. I would think, if you want to rent a movie, you'd want access instantaneously.
CinemaNow's "Free" option, on the other hand, buffers and begins playing immediately in a Windows Media Player window. It also allows you to switch bandwidth options from low to medium in case playback is choppy (as it was in my case). Unfortunately, switching bandwidth selections reloads the video from the beginning (no avoiding that, I'm afraid).
iTunes allows you to start playing a film immediately as it starts downloading, but that sometimes results in choppy playback - this may have more to do with iTunes 7's notoriously bloated PC footprint (something the manufacturers have said they're fixing). Since the download only took about 30 minutes (for "Casanova"), I decided to wait.
In all cases, the film quality was excellent. Not DVD-quality, but more than adequate for downloading.
Interestingly, none of these services have embraced bittorrent as a downloading platform. Its powerful abilities to distribute the download of a single file over multiple servers would probably allow these services to attain even faster download speeds for files that do not need to be streamed.
Portability
For the most part, these services are expecting that you'll watch the film on the PC you've downloaded to, or on their certified portable player (gigabeat or iPod for Vongo and iTunes, respectively). Each of the websites, in fact, has detailed instructions about how to attach your PC to your TV. However, you can't drag the movie to a Media Center, such as the Mvix player for example.
CinemaNow allows you to authorize up to 3 PCs to play your titles on, but it also offers the killer ability to Burn-to-DVD (for certain titles). This option, still in Beta, requires the download of CinemaNow's proprietary DVD burner. Once that's installed (yes, it requires a reboot so make sure you're not in the middle of downloading anything) you're able to choose "Download and Burn" from your CinemaNow shopping cart. Checkout then launches the DVD burner which simultaneously downloads the film and burns it (make sure you put a blank DVD in your drive).
I chose David Lynch's epic debacle "Dune" to test out this process, figuring its notoriously two-plus hour running time and sandworm effects would put the resulting DVD through its paces. To CinemaNow's credit, the download and burn process worked flawlessly. On the minus side, however, it took a full 8 hours for the download and burn process to finish (only about 40 minutes of that was burn time). Strangely, the resulting DVD caused Windows Media Player to crash on several attempts. I was able to use VideoLAN's VLC media player to play it. But CinemaNow did say this was a Beta product and anyway I didn't burn a DVD to play it on my PC! Moving over to my Onkyo DVD player, the resulting DVD played fine with menus intact. There were a few more artifacts than I'd expect from a store-bought DVD, and it didn't anamorphically fill the screen, but not a bad start. Plus, keep in mind I was watching it on a 98-inch projection screen.
With Movielink, you're pretty much stuck with watching on the PC you downloaded to.
Vongo also allows you to assign three devices to a single Vongo account. This means that you can install the Vongo application on your home PC and your laptop for taking your movies on the road. Just login with the same userid, and use your same subscription. You can also assign your portable media player (i.e., the gigabeat player) to your Vongo account and the download manager will sync with it directly.
With iTunes movies, like with music, you can authorize up to five machines to play your content. Movies are downloaded in Apple's m4v format which can only be played inside iTunes itself or on the iPod.
Since CinemaNow and Movielink use the native Windows Media Player, they play nicely with "placeshifting" services like Orb Networks. No such luck with iTunes and Vongo.
Security/Ownership
The sense of ownership gets a little tricky in the online downloading world. With the strange exception of iTunes, all the companies offer a rental option which allows you to download a film for a limited time (usually 24 hours). A rental download works the same as any other download, but when you first click on the file to watch it, your time limit starts. So don't make the mistake I did and open the file immediately to test its quality. Once you launch the file, it queries the site's license server and the clock starts. 24 hours later, you'll find that the license server won't validate your copy, so you've got a 1GB memory hole sitting on your hard drive. There's no returning to the video store: license revoked.
Only CinemaNow offers DVD burning to a playable DVD. The rest of the options mention DVD burning "for backup only" - and you know what that means.
Purchasing content is a different story. With Vongo's subscription service, you're not really buying anything, you're getting unlimited access to the Vongo "channel". So you don't need to keep it, you just access it whenever you need to - kinda like a virtual movie library.
With CinemaNow and Movielink, you're buying DRM-protected wmv files which you can play whenever you want on your authorized PC. iTunes works the same way but with their m4v files. So you are actually purchasing something for your money, just make sure your PC is authorized properly.
And so, Finally, the Conclusion
As you'd expect, no one vendor has gotten it entirely right yet - and that's not all their fault. They have a lot to contend with, particularly digital rights management (DRM) and obtaining the proper studio agreements to provide enough quality content. While no service is perfect, they all have their virtues.
For me, since I have all my music in iTunes, it makes sense to go that way for movies too. However, their selection of films is still far too small right now. I preferred CinemaNow's Burn-to-DVD feature and large selection, but it should take a few cues from Movielink's superior download manager and it needs to speed up rental downloads. Vongo has an uphill battle ahead to catch up with iTunes, but I liked its smaller file size option for downloading to portable players.
For the record, some favorite features:
CinemaNow
Burn-to-DVD. Surely the killer feature of this application. Though in the future we will hopefully move beyond media, right now this is the only option from any of the services that actually makes you feel you've gotten your money's worth. There's still no substitute for holding a DVD in your hand.
Movielink
Of the browser-based apps, Movielink has the best download manager and simple buy/rent pay-as-you-go option.
iTunes
Well, it's iTunes. It already has the market share. It's going to be tough for Vongo to combat that. iTunes also has the ability to pre-order movies for a discount (a la Amazon).
Vongo
The PC vs. Portable file size is very smart.
As early adoption goes, you could do worse than to stick your toe in the water of the online movie downloading space. Picking a vendor is a tough choice since they all do it pretty well. It will come down to which of the above criteria is the most important to you. Whatever the pros and cons, the current crop of video download services gives me hope for the future - a future without the hassles of theater lines, DVD scratches and lost Netflix envelopes. A future where your home theater becomes an instant gratification engine - where you have the movies you want to see at your fingertips. We're not there yet, but thanks to a few pioneering companies, we're on our way.
| Scorecard: Movie Download Services (as of 10/20/2006) | ||||
| CinemaNow | iTunes | Movielink | Vongo | |
| Cost |  | | | |
| Selection |  |  | | |
| Usability | | | |  |
| Speed/Quality | | | | |
| Portability | | | | |
| Security/Ownership | | | | |
| Overall | | | | |
Special Sign-Up Offers:
CinemaNow
CinemaNow, Inc.
4553 Glencoe Avenue
Suite 200
Marina del Rey , CA 90292
www.CinemaNow.com
iTunes
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
www.iTunes.com
Movielink
Movielink, LLC
2120 Colorado Ave., 4th Floor
Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.MovieLink.com
Vongo
Starz Entertainment, LLC
8900 Liberty Circle
Englewood, Colorado 80112
www.vongo.com
