11/13/2002 Entry:
"Movielink"

The other day I read several articles about this new startup called Movielink, which provides films for download and viewing on a rental basis. This is the venture that is a co-production of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros - their first foray into the digital world. This sounded pretty interesting to me for doing train viewings, since a downloaded movie wouldn't eat battery nearly as much as a DVD would (because it doesn't have to run the motor which spins the DVD.) So I figured I would give it a shot, which I did, and my report follows.

First off, Movielink's selection is pretty small at this point. There's probably only about 150 movies up there now, mixed between first run and older stuff. Some of the selections are interesting, for instance they had No Such Thing available for download. Some of the old stuff is just goofy, like Oh God, You Devil! and Foxy Brown and the Robert Altman Popeye. I mean, do they really see a market for those movies or did they just pick them at random? Or is this just stuff they could get the rights to quickly? On the other hand, some of the older selections were strangely cool like Parallax View and The In-Laws. Anyways, the point is this is not anywhere near a Netflix-quality selection. The rentals range from $4.95 for new releases all the way down to $1.99 for some of the old stuff.

So you go through and add movies to your picks, similar to Netflix's queue. The first time you want to download something, you have to get their Movielink Manager software, which is fine. When you are ready to get a film, you choose it from your queue, and it gets fed to the Movielink Manager and starts downloading. For my test, I chose The Parallax View since it was cheap and I had always been curious about it. It was 360M or so, took about an hour to download over DSL. When you choose to download a film, you give your credit card number and it charges you the amount as applicable. I was a little surprised by this, I figured that they would either A) require you to deposit some amount (like $20) and deduct rental fees from it or B) accrue your fees and bill you once a month. Doing the little charges all the time seems like a tough way to make money when you get processing fees into the mix.

Of course you can't just download it and go nuts. Once downloaded, the film is available for 30 days, however it deletes itself 24 hours after you start watching it. So basically once you start it, you have a day in which to watch it as much as you want. I believe this includes bonus materials for those films that include them, which seems pretty harsh as you can get into like 5+hours of viewing there. The first time you view a film, you have to be connected to the internet so it can go download the Digital Rights Management licensing stuff, but after that this step appears to be unnecessary.

So finally, on to the movie. I downloaded the Windows Media Player version, although there is also a RealPlayer version (which I skipped because Real is totally evil and I don't allow their software to grace my precious computer.) Upon playing I noticed to my shock and horror that the film was pan and scan. Now I don't know why this surprised me, I really should have known, but yet I was surprised. I mean, whats the fucking point of this? Its not like a letterboxed print isn't available (the DVD is letterboxed 1:2.35) so how hard is it? So that put me off the service right off the bat, and aspect ratio information is not listed on the site so you can't even knowledgeably avoid the pan and scan films (kind of like watching IFC.) Even so, I was going to suffer through for the sake of the experiment, but the film was so jerky and jumpy on my PC that I couldn't watch it. It would hiccup about every ten seconds. This was also a surprise since DVDs play just fine on my laptop and certainly running those off the DVD drive should be slower than running Movielink files off my hard drive. Finally, even when it was running without hiccuping, the quality was poor and pixelated. I never got through much more than 10 minutes of the film before giving up. I tried copying the film to a higher end PC just to see if it would run more smoothly, then I discovered something which was not really a surprise but isn't really advertised either - the film will only run on the PC to which it is downloaded.

So I consider Movielink a failure on all counts, and I haven't even addressed the poor economic model. $4.95 for a new release for 24 hours of viewing? Puh-lease. So let my wasted $2 be a lesson to you all!