The DVD became the most popular way to view movies for good reasons. The discs are sturdy, and the crisp images do not degrade with repeated showings. They take up little space. Some DVD players are cheaper than buying a DVD movie.
So why would anyone want to watch movies any other way? There is the bother of going to the neighborhood video store or waiting for delivery by mail. But downloading movies over a high-speed Internet connection offers the promise of convenience. You can get them delivered when you want.
Promise is the operative word for this new method. There are not a lot of titles available. Often the movies are not the latest releases. You may have to watch them on your computer monitor, not the 46-inch widescreen TV you just bought.
Consider what is probably the best movie-playing machine for downloads on the market today: the Microsoft Xbox 360, a video game console.
From setup to signup, to selecting a title and starting the show with a press of the remote's play button, the Xbox 360 is simple. It is as easy to use as the on-demand and pay-per-view services familiar to most watchers of cable or satellite TV.
But at US$400 for the model that includes a hard disk, which is needed to download movies, the Xbox is a big investment. If you aren't a gamer, it is hard to justify spending that amount just to watch a few movies.
The Xbox Live Marketplace has only 165 movies available. Ross Honey, Microsoft's senior director of the media and entertainment group, promised that more would be added each day. At US$4 for a new release that can be saved for up to 14 days on the hard drive, the service seems competitive with a rental from a Blockbuster store. As with all downloadable movie rentals, once you start watching one, you have only 24 hours to finish before it expires.
There are scores of alternatives, but at this stage the movie selection is a factor for each one. Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said: "Whether it's Netflix or Apple or Amazon or Wal-Mart.com, we're all facing the same constraint: title availability." Netflix, for example, has 80,000 titles on DVD, but only 2,000 for electronic delivery. Swasey said, "We believe DVDs will have a long life because the studios are not licensing vast amounts of content to anyone."
Most of these services - including MovieLink, CinemaNow, Vongo, Amazon's Unbox and Wal-Mart - send films straight to your computer. They require the installation of special movie manager software or a Web browser application specific to the service, but this isn't much of a bother. You also need to provide a credit card number when you sign up on a service's Web site.
The services, however, are intended to work only with Windows and its Internet Explorer. Apple's iTunes Store is the rare exception that works with both the Windows and Mac operating systems. A movie generally takes about an hour to download, although most services let you start watching before the download is finished.
Netflix cleverly ties its "Watch Now" collection to a dollar-an-hour scheme. Subscribers to the US$14.99 "two at a time" mail delivery plan, for instance, can watch up to 15 hours of movies a month. Netflix doesn't download the movies, but streams them so you watch them as they arrive. Vongo offers a US$9.99 a month all-you-can-eat plan to view as many of the service's 1,000-plus "subscription" movies as you like. These include popular recent movies like The Da Vinci Code and Click, yet the older Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is offered as a pay-per-view rental option, one of 300 titles costing US$2.99 or US$3.99 each.
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