Video Without Wires?

• Video Without Wires
• Video Everywhere?
• Movies on the Move
• Wireless World
• Protected Movies: Your Options
• Video Rental Sites

It seemed like a terrific idea at first: Get some of the latest wireless gear and see what I could do with video streaming through the air. For this story, I attempted three things: Download a movie or two over the Internet, watch the flicks across my wireless home network, and view videos on a handheld device. I imagined myself watching South Park episodes on my Pocket PC, and streaming Hollywood's newest releases over a wireless connection to my TV. It would be so cool.

Instead, it was mostly painful. What started as a romp with high-tech toys morphed into a three-week ordeal. I tackled hardware installation hiccups and wireless networking failures; and as I expected, I ran headlong into movie copyright protection issues.

That said, I eventually had a swell time streaming movie trailers and short videos to my wireless-enabled PDA. But in most respects, the hit-or-miss affair that is wireless digital video today remains a miss.

The first step in my movie odyssey was to download video. I registered for free with Movielink, one of many great Web-based rental services. Movielink offers over 800 movies in both Real Video and Windows Media Video 9 file formats. I installed the Movielink Manager applet on my PC and then paid $4 to rent Lost in Translation in WMV format.

Unfortunately, I ran into a glitch while downloading the 543MB file: Movielink Manager erroneously reported that I had two instances of the film in my queue. To avoid paying twice, I consulted an online rep, who cleared out the transaction and advised me to repurchase the movie. I did so; and 45 minutes later, I had downloaded the file over my cable connection. I also downloaded two others: The Rundown (528MB) and The Last Samurai (787MB). The Rundown transferred well, but The Last Samurai download initially failed because of the pop-up blocker in my Google Toolbar.

As expected, once I got past the download process, I ran into some use restrictions. After you download a movie from Movielink, you have up to 30 days to start watching it. If you fail to play the video within the rental period, the file is deleted. Once you start viewing a video, Movielink gives you 24 hours to view it as often as you like. But at the end of that time, the file becomes inaccessible unless you pony up $2 (or less) to purchase an additional 24 hours of viewing time. This may sound complicated--and it is. You've entered the madcap world of digital rights management (see "Protected Movies: Your Options").

I downloaded all three movies to my Pentium 4 laptop. I was surprised by how good the movies looked on my laptop's big 16-inch display. Image quality fell somewhere between VHS and DVD.