Cinematical

Speaking for myself, I've never felt the urge nor seen the point in downloading a movie. This could be because I primarily use a laptop and don't like to hear my fan run constantly, but even if I had a desktop I can't say I would feel the urge. Televisions and DVD players were invented for a reason and I use them for their intended purposes. Especially considering that my television screen is much larger than my computer screen.

I can see where downloaded movies would come in handy to a person who traveled extensively, but could someone who downloads movies as a general pass time explain to me why this is better than watching the movie on a TV?

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Umm, I think most people will already have the DVD.

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You need to think, not just of desktops and laptops here, but of Media Center PCs. Yes, they're still something of a geek item now. But will they cease to be a geek item if hundreds of thousands of movies are available for immediate purchase and download?

This very possibility could also motivate the cable companies to quickly up the ante with their on-demand services. Comcast On Demand is nice, but with only 100 or so recent movies available, it's no competition for Blockbuster or Netflix. If Comcast gets off its kiester and strikes deals to offer rentals of entire studio catalogs through On Demand - and other major providers like Time Warner and Cox follow suit - then we'll be talkin' serious movie heaven.

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I got to try Movielink for free recently.

I bought this product which came with a $5 code for Movielink, so I decided to check it out. Apparently the code doesn't work for all the movies which are available for renting, such as King Kong, Jarhead and others. For some reason though they were offering King Kong as a rental for only $0.9, so I decided to get it.

On the May 26th they were offering a lot of rentals at 50% off, so I used the $5 to get movies like Walk The Line, Capote and Good Night and Good Luck.

It usually takes about 1-1:30 minutes to download a movie on a cable connection. Download speeds were quite fast, hovering between 2-3Mb/second. I just finished watching Walk The Line, and I can say that the quality of the movies is quite good...about DVD quality I would say.

Some negatives regarding Movielink:
-I had to restart my computer twice to install the Movielink program which downloads the movies.
-The collection of movies is not that good. They don't have older movies like Goodfellas, nor the ones which just come out on DVD (I guess you have to wait a month or two).
-Price is a bit high. It costs $4.5 to rent most of the new movies. And $25 to buy the new ones!

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My bad, I meant to say that it takes between 1-1.5 hours to download a movie, not 1-1:30 minutes(That would be awesome!).

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i just don't get it. it is not fair because all of that stupid downloading thingy. it takes me a lot of time 2 download which so not what i like. can't it do any faster? i've always wanted 2 download that movie.

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OK, so someone has to address the logic. I can buy the dvd online at Amazon or offline at Best Buy and it costs me $20 (less if it is a new release). With that DVD, I can watch it (in a better resolution) on my big screen tv at home, my computer, my kitchen dvd/tv combo or pretty much anywhere ----or---- I spend $25 (heck, Blockbuster only charges $23 for new dvds), for an inferior resolution and restricted viewing to my computer (I know MCE exists, but who really uses it to stream?). The business model just doesn't make all that much sense to me.

Can someone explain it to me?

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