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Is it worth downloading movies legally?
Still, the folks at PC Magazine wanted to take a look at the current state of legal movie downloads. They spent a week with some of the top sites, including iTunes, CinemaNow, MovieLink, Vongo, Amazon Unbox, and MovieFlix.
In a nutshell, Amazon Unbox has the highest quality movies, CinemaNow is the only service that lets you burn videos to DVD, and MovieFlix is cheap, with a subscription of just $7.95 a month, but the selection is mostly older movies.
Some services let you buy or rent movies, while others only have an option to buy. And some services will let you transfer movies to a portable device, but DRM restrictions generally mean that you have a limited selection of what device you can use. Prices range from around $2.99 for a rental to $19.99 for a purchase, with most movies selling for $9.99 to $14.99 across all the sites.
But the thing is, you can download just about any movie that these sites carry for free illegally with a BitTorrent client. And you can burn it to a DVD, copy it to any portable device you like, including a PDA, or do just about anything else you like, such as edit clips together to make a montage or music video.
The advantage to using a store like Amazon Unbox is that you can be guaranteed a certain quality of video and a decent download speed. Oh yeah, and you're not breaking the law. But if the shopping experience is better with Amazon, the product you get illegally is often of higher quality. And until that problem is fixed, no number of lawsuits from the MPAA is going to stop people from illegally downloading films.
In the music world, EMI recently trook the initiative to start selling DRM-free files. How many years will we have to wait to see a movie studio take similar steps?
Comments
5
Subscribe to commentsPeterApr 16th 2007 5:42PM
"How many years will we have to wait to see a movie studio take similar steps?" - If people don't buy the EMI files or they use them as a quicker and easier route to piracy, then a VERY long time.
Buck Jones IIIApr 16th 2007 7:01PM
I'm pretty sure that the Microsoft XBOX 360 does High Definition rentals, so that would be the highest quality download.
VC-1 is the codec actually...which is the same as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.
YayajaApr 16th 2007 9:27PM
I agree completely. If there was a service that offered ALL the movies I wanted (including obscure anime, other foreign films, and documentaries) AND full seasons of all TV shows, in superb quality, and reasonable download speeds, Then I would gladly pay 20-25 bucks a month. Hell I could just cancel my cable. At that rate you would effectively be offering a cable replacement, and I guarantee that millions of people would sign up. Even if ten million people signed up, thats 200-250 million dollars a MONTH. In other words the entire production budget for the highest production budget for any movie ever (Spiderman 3) PER MONTH!! I don't think what i'm proposing is unreasonable.
JakeApr 18th 2007 5:56PM
I've been legally downloading (renting) movies from the internet as my only form of video entertainment for three years. After trying all the services I settled on MovieLink and continue to be pleased. I check back periodically to see if any other service competes, but to date have not found one that offered as good a combination of price, quality, selection, technology and customer service. I hope someday MovieLink and the others will find a way to increase the quantity of movies they have for rent. All the major rental sites have the same movies, but it would be nice if someday offered libraries similar to those of the DVD rental companies.
NeilApr 26th 2007 8:08AM
"In the music world, EMI recently trook the initiative to start selling DRM-free files. How many years will we have to wait to see a movie studio take similar steps?"
In fact, there are online movie stores (MyVideoLib - http://www.myvideolib.com, for example), which offer DRM-free movies for quite a reasonable price - from $2 for iPod version to $5 for DVD quality. However, we are still lacking large selection of movies and TV shows sold without any restrictions, like Yayaja mentioned. We can only hope that movie industry will move to it soon.