Movielink Ready To Roll
from the ready-to-fail dept
Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes for Movielink, the new online, Hollywood studio-backed, movie viewing company to fail? They’re launching today, and soon you’ll be able to spend just as much as you do at your local video store to watch a movie with fewer features than the DVD you could rent. You have to watch it on your PC instead of your TV. You only have a 24 hour window to watch it from the moment you hit play, also. Oh yeah, you also have to give up 2 gigs of space on your hard drive and wait while it sucks up all your bandwidth during the tedious download. Who is this going to appeal to again? That’s right, no one. Of course, after it’s declared a dismal failure, expect Jack Valenti to stand up and eloquently tell Congress, how they made such a valiant effort to offer legal movies online, but those crazy pirates made it impossible for them to succeed… all the while the “Boston strangler” of home video will continue to line his pockets.
Comments on “Movielink Ready To Roll”
Too expensive
Within 1.25 miles of my house, I have multiple movie rental places, all with different rental arrangements. Prices range from between $2.00 to $3.49 per movie, and length of rental ranges from one night to as long as 7 days. In each case, I get (for a limited time), a physical DVD or VHS tape that I can play to my hearts content on my home theater system featuring a 60″ digital TV.
For what they are charging, I could select a Pay-per-View movie from my satellite service and use the DV recorder built into my satellite receiver to watch it over and over again until I’m sick of it.
Now, instead of taking advantage of local businesses or work with my current satellite provider, I should pay more ($4.99, I checked) to watch a crummy streaming video on my PC? I can’t wait to invite my girlfriend over so we can snuggle in our roll-around desk chairs in front of my computer desk straining to see the crappy video with crappier sound on my 19″ monitor. Wow, isn’t that romantic.
For lonely shut-ins I can see where this could be of some use, but if all 187 lonely shut-ins in this country that have high speed internet access should happen to sign up, my guess it that they will have to rent an average of 56 movies each per day in order for this to show any profit (all numbers completely made up for purposes of humor and sarcasm).
Re: Too expensive
Anyone with a reasonable machine (mine cost $800), and a cable modem can start watching a movie within 2 minutes of clicking “download”. That’s damn fast. Anyone who complains about the technology probably just has a crappy machine… and that attitude will change over the next year or so as people upgrade.
Although the software works well and the downloads are speedy, is just too damn expensive and it has a crappy selection.
I can see them fixing the seleciton over time. But at that price… there’s no point. My video store rents DVD’s for $2.
How can they make it better?
Pricing asides, any suggestions on making it better? They cannot do anything about the speed of the service or the need for a few GB of space on your HD. Giving people a 24 hour window to watch the film in the next 30 days is reasonable for new movies, 7 days would be better for older ones. Support for other OSes would be nice. The key fact is that movies over the Internet are limited by today’s tech constraints.
Service works VERY well, but
Anyone with a reasonable machine (mine cost $800), and a cable modem can start watching a movie within 2 minutes of clicking “download”. That’s damn fast. Anyone who complains about the technology probably just has a crappy machine… and that attitude will change over the next year or so as people upgrade.
Although the software works well and the downloads are speedy, is just too damn expensive and it has a crappy selection.
I can see them fixing the seleciton over time. But at that price… there’s no point. My vieo store rents DVD’s for $2.
On-line movies
Like a fool I downloaded Vongo. After tiring of it I attempted to cancel it and did so on line through their site. There were no telephone numbers to use for contact.
I then deleted their program from my computer. A week later I note a charge for a movie download which I did not make.
The only way to contact them is through their, which i don’t want to download again. Don’t be a fool. Stay away from Vongo. You can’t get live customer support. At leasst I haven’t found a way. If anyone has a telephone numer please let me know by e-mail at wmurray8@comcast.net.