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Xbox Live Marketplace

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:00:50 -0500

The only way to play videos from the Xbox Marketplace is with your Xbox 360; any hard-drive-equipped 360 can download and play them.

It turns out that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is good for more than just playing games and streaming the occasional transcoded video file. Indeed, the game console can also be a source of movie and TV-episode downloads using Microsoft’s online store, Xbox 360 Marketplace.

Unlike most of the other services we tested, Marketplace doesn’t have a PC component. You rent movies using the Xbox’s interface and the videos are downloaded directly to the Xbox’s hard drive, where all the standard rules apply: You have 30 days to begin viewing and 24 hours to finish once you start. Of course, you’ll need a network-connected, hard drive-equipped Xbox 360 to play. And you should know that the browsing interface uses the Xbox’s standard design, which isn’t exactly “mom” friendly. TV content is for purchase only and typically costs $2 per episode. Each network’s key programming—think Lost and CSI—is available in high def for an extra buck, but don’t expect to see much from NBC here.

There isn’t a massive library of back content available—the service featured fewer than 400 movies as we went to press. In our catalog tests, Marketplace fared OK in the new-releases department, offering the same titles you’d have to fight over at the video store. It didn’t fare as well with classic and cult titles, but the good news is that much of the content for sale is also available in high definition. Like the other services that use WMV technology, videos rented from Marketplace suffer from the soft edges and large file sizes common to the codec. Standard-def movies look slightly worse than traditional DVDs, and the high-def content is noticeably inferior to Blu-ray.

For whatever insane reason, Microsoft chose to base the payment scheme for Marketplace around Microsoft Points, which have an extremely confusing conversion scheme. One dollar buys you 80 points, and each movie rental costs 360 points for standard-definition files and 480 points for high definition. For folks who have trouble with math, SD movies cost $4.50, while HD films cost $6. That makes SD movies on Xbox Live Marketplace pricier than the competition, but HD content is on par with Vudu’s prices for 1080p content. What’s more annoying is that you can’t buy just the number of points that you need. Instead, you have to buy points in multiples of $5. So, to rent a movie for $6, you need to buy at least $10 worth of points. Lame. Points are tied to your Xbox Gamertag. Assuming you have the points to make the purchase, click the purchase button and the video will start downloading. As soon as the Xbox has sufficiently filled its buffer, the content will begin playing.

Like the other WMV-powered services, Marketplace could use a codec refresh. Despite the outdated codec, this is one of the few services that actually delivers HD content. We’d also like to be able to play downloaded content on portable devices and our PCs. That just seems like a natural option, especially given the rich ecosystem that Microsoft has built for media playback. Finally, we’d really like to see a lot more content on the service. Three hundred movies and change just isn’t enough for serious movie buffs.

Hardware: $350
Movie rentals: $4 to $6
Movie purchases: N/A
TV episodes: $2

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Vudu

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:00:24 -0500

The Vudu offers an attractive industrial design, but it stays cool enough that you can hide it in the depths of your entertainment center.

Vudu delivers more HD content than any other service, but achieving that image quality requires you to purchase a $300 box that can’t be truly integrated into the rest of your home network (meaning you can’t stream the content downloaded to it from one room to another). And the company currently has HD licensing deals with only Lionsgate, Paramount, and Universal; the rest of its offerings are limited to standard definition.

Seduced by what we thought was terrific image quality, we spent a long honeymoon with the Vudu. The box is cool and extremely quiet (it had no issues with being tucked inside our entertainment center), the intuitive user interface is superior to any of the web-based alternatives, and the custom remote control is sheer genius. Vudu encodes the films it offers in a proprietary flavor of MPEG-4, and the box downloads films in the highest resolution your display will support (from 480i to 1080p). But since the Vudu’s 1080p output is timed at 24 frames per second (to match the original film), the box had to drop down to 1080i in order to be compatible with our ViewSonic N4285p television (which can display 1080p, but only at a refresh rate of 30Hz or 60Hz).

But our newlywed bliss evaporated when we finally compared the downloaded HD versions of movies played on the Vudu box to the same films played on the Blu-ray drive in our home-theater PC: Vudu’s versions offered significantly less detail. Video image quality was leagues beyond the soft-edged offerings on tap from the standard-definition services, but it wasn’t nearly as good as what we saw on the disc.

Movie buffs should also bear in mind that movies encoded in high definition make for much larger files than what the other services have to offer. Vudu, like all the other services reviewed here, uses a progressive download system, so you don’t need to download the entire movie before you begin watching it. But if your broadband Internet connection is 1.5Mb/s or slower, you will experience a significant delay—it could be an hour or more—before you’ve grabbed enough of the file to start. Vudu recommends having at least a 2Mb/s connection for standard-definition movies and a 4Mb/s connection for HD content.

Vudu offers movies for rent and purchase and TV shows for purchase. The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, but your credit card is billed in $20, $50, or $100 increments, as opposed to the per-transaction basis that the other services operate on. Movies downloaded to the Vudu’s 250GB hard drive are stuck there; they can’t be burned to disc (even for backup purposes), streamed across a network using a Media Center Extender, or transferred to a portable device. Vudu tells us its customers will be able to re-download purchased movies in the event of a hard-drive failure or other catastrophe.

Vudu’s back catalog listed three of the AFI’s top 25 movies for sale (Lawrence of Arabia, Psycho, and Chinatown), but it didn’t offer any of them for rent. Reservoir Dogs (available for $10) was the only movie on our list of cult classics we could find for sale or rent.

At press time, the Vudu box was about $50 cheaper than the least-expensive Blu-ray drive and about half the price of a Blu-ray-equipped DIY home-theater rig, but is the instant gratification of watching a movie without having to go to the store (and hoping it’s in stock) or waiting for it to show up from Netflix (with the same caveat) worth knowing that the image quality is worse than what you would get from a disc? We’re not so sure the trade-off is worthwhile.

Hardware: $300
Movie rentals: $4 to $6
Movie purchases: $10 to $20
TV episodes: $2

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Vongo

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:00:01 -0500

Vongo movies can be streamed to your TV using any Windows Media Center Extender device, including the Linksys DMA2200.

Vongo’s subscription business model puts it in a category all its own: The service’s primary focus is to provide an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of movies and other video content that can be downloaded to your PC for a $10 monthly fee. It doesn’t offer any for-purchase content, and its TV offerings are nearly nonexistent.

Vongo is a division of Starz Entertainment, which has contracts with all the major Hollywood movie studios for semi-exclusive access to their films—but only after those movies have played out in theaters, the pay-per-view market, and as disc sales. Starz offers the same films on cable TV. A Vongo representative tells us these contracts cover about 40 percent of all Hollywood movies released in the last nine years. HBO is in a similar position, but that firm doesn’t currently offer a download service.

When we compared Vongo’s movie library to the rest of the field, we did indeed find that Vongo had many movies to offer that could not be rented online anywhere else. CinemaNow, Movielink, and others had them available for sale, but not for rent. And with Vongo, you can watch the content as often as you like—or for at least as long as Vongo has the right to offer it.

There is no free lunch, however, especially not in Hollywood: When we looked to Vongo for 25 of the latest releases, we found only one that was covered by the monthly subscription price and only one other that was available on a pay-per-view basis. Vongo also doesn’t have much in the way of classic films (nothing from the AFI’s top 25 list, for instance), and we didn’t find any of our 10 cult classics in its listings. We did find some other gems, including Dr. Strangelove, From Dusk Till Dawn, and a host of low-brow offerings from Troma Entertainment (the studio that brought you Toxic Avenger).

You’ll need to download the Vongo client in order to browse the service’s library, download content, and watch previews. The application has a search engine that enables you to find content by title, actor/director, category, format (standard or widescreen), MPAA/TV rating, language, and device (PC or portable). You can also search for subscription content, pay-per-view titles, or both.

Vongo’s movie and (limited) TV offerings are delivered in the equivalent of standard definition (roughly 480i or 480p, dependent on your display) in WMV format. Video quality, as scaled by the Radeon 3850 videocard in our home-theater rig to our 42-inch ViewSonic N4285p TV, was very good. Being limited to standard definition isn’t a major shortcoming now (since most of the movies in Vongo’s library predate HD video anyway), but it will become a drawback as today’s new releases are remastered for Blu-ray before making their way into Vongo’s library.

Downloaded content can be streamed over a Windows Media Center Extender to a TV (assuming you have a version of Windows that includes Media Center), but Vongo’s 10-foot user interface is also integrated into versions of Vista that include Windows Media Center. This means you can use a Media Center remote to control the Vongo client.

Like your movies on the go? Vongo’s service can be used on as many as three devices simultaneously. One of these must be a PC, but the other two can be either PCs or Vongo-certified portable video players (including the Archos 605 WiFi, Creative Labs’s Zen Vision: M, and Toshiba’s Gigabeat V.)

If you can wait a year or so for movies to filter through the system and into the Starz library, $10 per month for all the movies you can watch is a great deal. We’re not that patient, although we were reminded of a number of films that we’d forgotten to watch when they were new—and now they can’t be rented from the other services.

Subscription: $10/month
Movie rentals: $1 to $4
Movie purchases: N/A
TV episodes: $2

< Back to Main Page Vudu >

Movielink

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:59:51 -0500

The Movielink software client is integrated into both versions of Windows Media Center, so you can easily watch your rentals from the comfort of your couch, using an MCE-compatible remote.

Movie-rental outfit Blockbuster Entertainment acquired movie-download service Movielink in August 2007, but the company seems to have lost interest in its latest asset. When we contacted Blockbuster’s corporate communications department in preparation for this story, they couldn’t be bothered to provide us with Movielink’s phone number (which wasn’t listed on either company’s website). It’s easy to see why.

The fact that Movielink is integrated into Windows Media Center gives it a leg up over BitTorrent, but there’s nothing else about the service to recommend it over CinemaNow or any of the other services we tested. And if you’re interested in watching rented or purchased movies on a handheld device, Movielink isn’t for you—it supports only notebooks. Oh, and Movielink doesn’t support Firefox either, unless you install the Firefox add-on IE Tab. Now that’s just lazy.

Movielink’s catalog is comparable to that of CinemaNow, Unbox, and Vudu. Movie rentals and TV episode prices are the same as the competition’s ($2 and $4, respectively), but like the rest of the field, its movie purchase prices were $5 higher than Unbox across the board. The search engine in the Movielink Manager client enables you to locate films by category (including Coming Soon, Last Chance, and Award Winners, as well as by genre, director, actor, or keyword). Searches can be limited to rentals only, purchase only, or both. Movielink does have a cult cinema category, but Office Space was the only movie available from our list. It did have some other good catches, however, including Roger Corman’s Bucket of Blood, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and the blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown.

You can play downloaded content on up to three PCs, make backup copies on DVD (in their original format, which won’t play on a standard DVD player), and stream from a PC to your TV using a Media Center Extender (using either Vista or Windows XP). All of Movielink’s videos are in WMV format and in standard definition, so they suffer from many of the same scaling problems as the rest of the SD field.

Movie rentals: $3 to $4
Movie purchases: $8 to $20
TV episodes: $2

< Back to Main Page Vongo >

iTunes Store

Michael Brown Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:59:27 -0500

The Apple TV sure looks sexy, but it doesn’t even include the basic cables you need to hook it up to a TV. Where’s the 10-cent component-video cable, Apple?

Apple’s tight connection with Disney (owner of the ABC television network and Pixar animation studio), its support for high-definition H.264 video, and a slick set-top box for playing your favorite TV shows and movies in your living room, render the iTunes Store an attractive proposition for home-theater enthusiasts. Too bad its video is limited to 720p.

But let’s start with what we like. The video quality of content on the iTunes Store is superior to all the WMV services (although Vongo’s quality is pretty good), which we mainly attribute to Apple’s use of H.264. High-definition files look very good and, unlike many of the other services we tested, were noticeably superior to standard-definition DVD quality, although the lower-bit-rate downloads still fall noticeably short of the quality offered by Blu-ray discs.

Naturally, all this comes at a price: Standard-def movies rent for the going rate of $4, but HD rentals cost $5. The big problem with iTunes’s current HD playback is that it works only with the Apple TV; you can’t view high-def content via your PC. TV shows cost $2 per episode to own, but you’ll get a better deal if you purchase an entire season of episodes. For people who watch only a few TV series each season, buying the downloads could be a better deal than paying for cable TV—if you don’t mind the low resolution.

Watching downloaded video on your PC is all well and good, if you live in a dorm or have a 40-inch monitor. How does iTunes work when you want to watch your purchased or rented video on a TV or on the go? Reasonably well, as long as you purchase Apple gear. Rented movies work with any current-gen iPhone or iPod (5th-gen and older iPod users are out of luck) and follow the same basic rules as all the other services we’ve tested: You have 30 days to start watching and 24 hours to finish.

If your PC isn’t in your living room, you’ll need to buy an Apple TV, which will enable you to stream music and photos as well as content you rent or purchase from iTunes. You can either set it up to make a straight copy of your iTunes library or stream the file in iTunes across your network. Copying media to the Apple TV means it will always be available whether or not your PC is powered up, but this will rapidly fill the device’s small drive (40GB or 160GB). As you’d expect from an Apple product, the interface is slick and the purchasing experience is simple—it easily passes the “mom” test. Movie playback starts as soon as the buffer is sufficiently filled, and you can fast-forward, rewind, and skip to chapters using the included remote. Because the Apple TV uses purely passive cooling, it’s important to make sure you leave plenty of room around it. And don’t place anything on top of it—it doesn’t like that. (See In the Lab on page 72 for more info on the Apple TV.)

The biggest problem with iTunes right now is its catalog. While there are tons of TV shows (nothing from NBC or Universal, but ABC, CBS, Fox, CW, and many cable channels are well represented), the movie selection is paltry and even new releases were showing up a week or more later than they were on the other services we tested (that might change as time goes on). And if the standard-definition content is sparse, the HD content is nearly nonexistent. Only seven titles on our list of 25 new releases were available for rent in HD. That’s better than the two HD titles Vudu had to offer; on the other hand, Vudu had 18 of our 25 new releases available for rent, compared to iTunes’s 10. Apple didn’t have any HD titles available for purchase (Vudu had two)—not that we’d recommend that, given the current state of iTunes DRM.

Our verdict may change with time, but for now, there simply aren’t enough titles to consider the iTunes Store a serious rental competitor.

Hardware: $230 and up
Movie rentals: $2 to $5
Movie purchases: $10 to $15
TV episodes: $2

< Back to Main Page Movielink >

CinemaNow

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:59:07 -0500

CinemaNow is aggressive about servicing a broad variety of hardware, including portable devices and Media Center PCs, like this Asus Minuet.

CinemaNow offers newly released movies on the same pay-per-view model that most of the other services here (with the exception of Vongo) use, but the service also sells a limited collection of movies that can be downloaded and burned to a DVD that can be played anywhere. CinemaNow’s optional subscription service allows unlimited downloads, but these titles cannot be burned.

We can’t imagine who would spend $30 per month (or pay just $100 for an entire year!) to watch the less-than-B movies that CinemaNow has on tap (Addicted to Murder II: Tainted Blood, Planet of the Werewolf, Backyard Fight Clubs Volume III). If the free content on YouPorn leaves you less than satisfied, on the other hand, membership in CinemaNow’s Platinum Club also entitles you to unlimited access to AllAdultChannel.com.

The service’s burn-to-DVD offerings range in price from $9 to $20, and we found many of Hollywood’s better, if not exactly fresh, offerings (including Reservoir Dogs, Requiem for a Dream, and Secretary) selling for just $10. But why bother downloading movies and burning them to a disc when you can buy them factory-pressed for nearly the same price? Besides, most of the other films we found in this category are much less appealing than those cult faves (anyone in the mood for a Sinbad comedy special?). You can burn any other purchased movie to disc, but only as a backup data file—the discs will not play on standard DVD drives or players.

CinemaNow’s rental model is much more typical, with pay-per-view movies going for between $2 and $4 (with new releases such as Michael Clayton and Rendition priced at the higher end of that range). The service had 16 of our top 25 new releases available for rent and 19 available for purchase. Customers have a 24-hour window to watch the movie within 30 days of downloading it. New releases available for purchase averaged $20 each. These titles cannot be burned to disc, but they can be viewed on up to three devices, including PlaysForSure handhelds.

As with the other services, CinemaNow was much lighter on classic content and had only three of the AFI’s top 25 films available for rent (Psycho, On the Waterfront, and To Kill a Mockingbird). Office Space was the only one of our cult favorites available for rent; that and Reservoir Dogs were the only films on that list available for sale.

CinemaNow has some TV content for sale ($2 per episode), which can be transferred to portable devices but cannot be burned to disc. We found much of Fox TV’s programming (including 24 and The Family Guy, but not The Simpsons), several of Showtime’s original series (such as Brotherhood but not Dexter), and a handful of classic TV shows from the 1960s (including Time Tunnel and I Spy).

CinemaNow is integrated into both versions of Windows Media Center (XP and Vista) and content can be streamed to your TV using a Media Center Extender. The service has also been integrated into HP’s MediaSmart LCD TVs, which have integrated network-streaming hardware. Movies and TV episodes are delivered in WMV format at the equivalent of standard definition (640x480 resolution). When we scaled video up on our home-theater PC, we noticed significant compression artifacts in shadows and dark skies, a problem we experienced with every WMV-based service except Vongo. As with most of the other services reviewed here, we judged video quality to be less than what you would get from a DVD.

We can’t recommend CinemaNow’s subscription service at any price, and its movie offerings are about the same as the rest of the field’s (both in terms of price and the depth of its catalog). The service does earn points for supporting multiple PCs and portable devices and for being integrated into both versions of Windows Media Center. But the bar set by the competing services is pretty low.

Movie rentals: $2 to $4
Movie purchases: $9 to $20
TV episodes: $2

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BitTorrent

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:58:46 -0500

BitTorrent isn’t integrated with Windows Media Center and the service doesn’t offer a 10-foot user interface of its own, so it’s best experienced on a desktop PC.

Most readers will be familiar with the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol, which earned a somewhat notorious reputation as the tool of choice for people sharing large copyrighted files—particularly Hollywood movies—over the Internet. Bram Cohen, the programmer who originally created the protocol, has since founded BitTorrent, Inc. to exploit legal applications for his product. Movie downloads are one.

The beauty of the BitTorrent protocol is that no one person needs to bear the entire cost of hosting huge files, such as movies; instead, each existing recipient of the file supplies chunks of the data to newer recipients. That model works exceedingly well for those who need to host the file, but we’re not quite sure how consumers paying for downloadable content benefit.

BitTorrent offers a broad mix of movies, TV shows, and other content for rent or purchase; it also offers some advertising-supported content. Purchased titles can be viewed on up to two computers, but rented titles can be viewed only on the PC they were originally downloaded to. Purchased movies can be burned to disc, but the disc can be played only on PCs that you’ve “activated” by signing into your BitTorrent account. BitTorrent does not permit purchased files to be transferred to portable devices, which we view as a major shortcoming.

What’s worse is that the BitTorrent user interface is not integrated into either version of Windows Media Center, which makes it nearly impossible to browse the site’s content from the comfort of your couch. In fact, the only way to search the service’s library is to use the primitive tools on its website. This matters little if you’re watching movies on your desktop PC, but it’s a real pain if you’re using a home-theater PC or streaming content to a Media Center Extender.

BitTorrent offers downloadable videos in both SD and HD and in WMV, H.264, and MPEG-4 formats, but the Hollywood offerings we sampled were all SD WMV files (with all the image-quality issues inherent to that format). We also found BitTorrent’s prime movie library to be thinner than average, with only eight of our 25 new-release searches available for rent and nine available for sale. We found only two of our favorite cult films in the library: Office Space (for rent and for sale) and Reservoir Dogs (for sale only), but we did encounter some great horror films offered for free, which can be moved and burned to disc without restrictions.

It’s definitely worth searching BitTorrent’s library for unusual and free content, but the service has nothing to offer over the other services reviewed here.

Movie rentals: $3 to $4
Movie purchases: $10 to $20
TV episodes: $2

< Back to Main Page CinemaNow >

Amazon Unbox

Michael Brown & Will Smith — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:58:29 -0500

One of Unbox’s strengths is its tight integration with TiVo. You can queue movies for download to your TiVo from any PC.

If you’re like us, you’ve bought a lot of traditional media, be it DVDs, CDs, or—gasp!—books, from Amazon.com over the years yet have downloaded little or no content from its digital stores. After spending some time with Unbox—Amazon’s relatively new movie and TV download service—we’re about ready to start using it regularly. With a broad selection of inexpensive content and an easy and cheap way to get Unbox content to your living room, we initially thought this would be the service to beat—despite a complete lack of HD content.

Rental prices range from $3 to $4; purchases range from less than $10 to around $15. As with the other services, we wouldn’t recommend purchasing downloadable movies—given the usage restrictions—but Amazon does make some allowances to fair use: Your purchase lets you download a TiVo-friendly file, a PC-friendly file, and a file that’s optimized for PlaysForSure portable players. If you’re browsing the web interface, there’s even a handy chart on every page that tells you the aspect ratio, audio format, and file size for each of the different formats. We’d rather just buy an unencumbered DVD, but this is among the most consumer-friendly services we tested.

Unbox’s PC software is unremarkable and a little buggy. It handles the file downloads and playback for both PCs and mobile devices. As with all the other services we examined, it operates on a progressive-download model that enables you to begin watching the movie while the download is in progress (as soon as it grabs enough data to fill its buffer). Unbox’s integration with TiVo, however, sets it apart from the competition. Using any network-connected Series2 or Series3 TiVo (Series2 boxes can be found for around $100), you can watch rented or purchased movies on your big-screen TV. (But you’ll have to wait for the entire file to be downloaded first; progressive download isn’t available on the TiVo.)

You can also purchase content directly from your TiVo using the remote. The TiVo ordering interface isn’t bad, but we prefer the extra information Amazon provides through the web browser. Once you make your purchase, you can choose to start downloading to your PC or send the file to your TiVo. We’d like to see support for high-definition content, but Amazon needs to switch to a more efficient codec before that will work—even standard-def movies are larger than 2GB.

The content library is impressive, with good coverage in new releases as well as a decent number of classic titles and cult classics; the price is right, too. We’re fond of Unbox, but it’s certainly not perfect. The service uses WMV, which leaves a lot to be desired in the image-quality department. The video we downloaded was decent but a bit soft, similar to that of the other WMV-powered services we tested and clearly inferior to the quality of video we downloaded from the iTunes Store, which was itself inferior to DVDs.

Still, we wouldn’t say the video quality from Unbox was unacceptable, and combined with its easy method for getting content to the living room, support for portable devices, and reasonable pricing, we believe this is a fairly compelling service. The only thing missing is high-definition content using a better codec, which would make Unbox the clear winner here. We won’t buy movies from Unbox anytime soon, but we’re perfectly content renting from the service.

Movie rentals: $4
Movie purchases: $10 to $15
TV episodes: $2