Online Music: New Hits and Misses

Movie Services: Blockbusters Through Broadband?

Music isn't the only commodity being traded on file sharing networks. Movies like The Hulk, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and Spider-Man are zooming around on Kazaa. Legal online movie services have been a long time in coming, but they are available. The question is, are they worth it?

Anticipating increased competition from file sharing, the major film studios have backed two competing services called CinemaNow and Movielink. Each offers a legal way to download movies on a pay-per-view basis. Prices for a movie range from $3 to $5.

Downloading the 525MB-to-600MB movies I rented from Movielink took around 2.5 hours over my DSL connection, which is actually pretty quick. Still, each movie you download represents 2 to 3 hours during which your Net connection will essentially be unavailable, so you'll want to schedule your downloads around the times you aren't using your PC. Movielink's download manager program provides some relief, allowing you to pause and resume downloads and to queue multiple movies.

When you finish downloading a movie, you have 30 days to start playing it. Once you click Play, you get a day to watch the movie before it deletes itself from your hard drive. Though the movies appear a notch below VHS quality, they don't look too bad. Still, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend them over Netflix or even your local video store--why spend 2 hours downloading a 90-minute movie?