Feature: Movies on the Run

During a recent cross-country flight, I grew tired of reading and needed some mindless video entertainment. Had it not been for Netflix, my only option would have been to endure the in-flight movie, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams--a potential fate that still makes me shudder.

When it comes to bringing your own in-flight movies, you've got two options: Rent a DVD or download a movie. Netflix, an online DVD rental service, lets you rent two or more discs at any given time for as long as you like. Select the DVDs you want online; receive them in the mail; watch them; send them back in postage-prepaid envelopes. It's a beautifully simple process. And if you travel with a notebook that's got a DVD-ROM, a Netflix membership allows you to watch movies in transit without incurring late fees or having to buy the discs.

But after several years as the dominant DVD rental service, Netflix now has competition from Wal-Mart and FilmCaddy.com, with others (such as Columbia House) on the way. Meanwhile, the recently launched Movielink allows you to download movies to your computer, providing yet another option for movie watching on the go.

I compared the three upstarts--Movielink, Wal-Mart.com, and Blockbuster's FilmCaddy.com--to Netflix. My ratings take into account such factors as Web site search capabilities, each service's ease of use, title availability, and the length of time it takes to obtain movies. I searched for the same six titles: The Simpsons, second season; American Beauty, the 1999 Oscar winner for Best Picture; Great Expectations, David Lean's 1946 adaptation of the Dickens classic; Hairspray, John Waters' delightfully silly 1988 hit and the basis for the current Broadway musical; Austin Powers in Goldmember, last summer's hit spy spoof; and The Spy Who Loved Me, a 1970s James Bond epic.

Here's how the rental services rate, from my least to most favorite on a scale of 0 to 4 stars (excellent).

Movielink

• Inventory: About 200 titles
  
  
• Rental cost: $2 to $5 per movie
  
  
• Free trial period: None offered, but first-time users get $2 off
  
  
• Rating: 2 stars
  
  

The concept is cool: Select the movies you want; download them to your hard drive; watch them when you're ready. That's all there is to it. Movies are automatically deleted after their rental term expires. There's no waiting for discs and no futzing with returns. And the site, backed by MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal, and Warner Bros., is slick, with an attractive interface, online trailers, and so on.

But Movielink isn't quite ready for prime time--at least not for mobile professionals looking for easy entertainment on the fly.

To start, a high-speed Internet connection such as a DSL line is required to download files--something not all notebook owners may have access to. The files are huge (600MB or more), which makes it impractical to download them on a desktop PC that has a high-speed connection and then copy them to a notebook that doesn't. Even with a high-speed connection, it can take nearly two hours to download a two-hour movie.

Most inconveniently, the first time you watch a downloaded movie you must have an active Internet connection in order to enable digital rights security to be authenticated. So you can't start a movie for the first time during, say, a cross-country flight. Instead, you'd have to remember to start it in advance, while your notebook is still connected to the Net. To complicate matters, you often must finish watching a movie within 24 hours of starting it--which would preclude you from beginning the movie on one leg of your trip and finishing it four days later on the return flight.

You can play movies in either the Windows Media or RealOne players. I chose Windows Media Player, which displayed the movie in a 4.5-inch (diagonal) window. The movie I rented, Enough with Jennifer Lopez kick-boxing her nutcase husband into oblivion, looked crisp, with good color and fluid motion, and had adequate sound quality.

Still, I'd rather have watched it on DVD. Movies on DVD are often shown in letterbox format, which preserves the film's original screen ratio (this wasn't the case with the downloaded J. Lo movie). A DVD's chapter stops makes it easy to jump immediately to a desired scene, while a downloaded movie is simply one long file, navigated via a slider bar. And should you want to watch a DVD on your TV set, no problem--just pop it into the DVD drive. You can't do that with a downloaded movie, for obvious reasons.

Eventually, video-on-demand services like Movielink may replace the DVD. But that time is years away, as far as I can tell.

Wal-Mart.com

• Inventory: About 12,000 titles
  
  
• Rental cost: $18.86 per month for up to three rentals
  
  
• Free trial period: 30 days
  
  
• Rating: 2.5 stars
  
  

Wal-Mart claims to have as many titles in its inventory as Netflix, but that meant very little when it came to actually renting what I wanted.

Netflix had five of my six titles immediately available for shipping, but Wal-Mart had only one, with several listed as requiring a "very long wait." Oddly enough, the one title Netflix didn't have--Great Expectations--was the one DVD on my list that Wal-Mart did have in stock.

I put a total of three DVDs in my Wal-Mart rental queue. The first, One True Thing with Meryl Streep, arrived four business days later, while the second, the Bond romp The Man With the Golden Gun, came five business days later. The third disc, Hairspray, was initially listed as a "very long wait." But the next day, when I checked my queue again, Hairspray was listed as "available." Even though I could have up to three titles out at any one time, and at that time had received only two discs, Hairspray inexplicably never shipped. As of this writing, it is still sitting in my rental queue--and still listed as "available."

Wal-Mart's site is pleasant to browse. I appreciate that it provides inventory status up front, so you'll know if a title is available before adding it to your rental queue. But its search function needs work. A search on James Bond movies found nothing but DVDs for sale, not rent, and my request for Fellini's La Strada somehow yielded a George Kennedy slasher movie called The Terror Within.

FilmCaddy.com

• Inventory: About 8000 titles
  
  
• Rental cost: $19.95 a month for up to four DVDs
  
  
• Free trial period: 30 days
  
  
• Rating: 3 stars
  
  

For $20 a month, FilmCaddy.com lets you have up to four discs out at any time-one title more than Wal-Mart.com or Netflix allows for that amount. Its search engine is superior to the competition, letting you find films by genre, rating, cast, director, or title. Discs arrive in protective padded sleeves, compared to the thin paper jackets that Wal-Mart.com and Netflix use for shipping. FilmCaddy.com had five of the six discs on my list, with the exception of Austin Powers in Goldmember, which had just been released at the time.

FilmCaddy.com's main drawback is its lack of inventory information. Unlike Wal-Mart.com and Netflix, you have no idea if your desired titles are in stock--which prevents you from giving the currently available titles you want to rent a high priority in your queue and assigning a lower priority to discs that aren't in stock.

I received three DVDs four business days after I requested them. While that's better than Wal-Mart.com's sluggish shipping, it's about twice as long as Netflix's average. All told, FilmCaddy.com is a worthy competitor to Netflix, but still not quite on the same level.

Netflix

• Inventory: About 12,000 titles
  
  
• Rental cost: $13.95 monthly for up to four rentals a month and no more than two at a time; $19.95 a month for up to three discs out at a time; $29.95 monthly for up to five movies out at a time; or $39.95 for up to eight movies out at a time
  
  
• Free trial period: 30 days
  
  
• Rating: 3.5 stars
  
  

The Netflix site is easy to navigate, and movies are grouped in categories such as "True-Life Tales," "Wacky Comedy," and "Star-Crossed Lovers" that make browsing a pleasure. There are multiple membership options. And I've rarely had to wait more than two days for a disc to arrive.

But as good as it is, Netflix has some room for improvement. Its search engine is basic, and you don't know if a title is in stock until you add it to your rental queue. (Wal-Mart.com provides inventory status up front, as I mentioned earlier, and FilmCaddy.com offers no status information whatsoever.) Still, after my experiments with its competitors, I'm still convinced Netflix is the best, most convenient online DVD rental service available.

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