AfterDawn: News

Movie rental downloads for 99 cents and less

Service provider America Online and video-on-demand service Movielink have teamed up, and are promoting a "Winter Movie Special", a five week program that lets AOL for Broadband members exclusively download and rent some of the year's biggest movie titles for as little as 99 cents or less for each title.

Among the special priced items are movies like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The movies are offered to AOL Broadband Members at 80 percent off the regular prices, $3.95 to $4.99, which means that the prices will fall between 79 and 99 cents.



The downloadable Movielink movies can be stored on hard disk for 30 days. After the movie is first viewed, it can be watched as many times as wanted during a 24-hour period.

Source: Press release

Written by: Jari Ketola @ 23 Jan 2004 16:07

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• 9 comments

• Nephilim

  Whoop-tee-doo. Any bets on how long it will take some 15 year old to hack the file and keep them?
  
  Unless you have a home theater PC this seems like a total waste.

  23.1.2004 20:08 #1

• Ghostdog

  I agree with the 24-hour restriction (though it could be longer, 48 maybe?) but not with the 30-day one and the pricing. The movies should cost a bit less to rent than they do at a rental-store, since the customer has to spend time and money to actually obtain the film.
  
  In todays hectic world a lot of people don´t have time to watch movies very often. Imagine renting the movie from Movielink and then something unexpected comes up. And when you finally have time to watch the movie, oops! Your thirty days are up. Okay, rare situation maybe. But it still seems dumb to have a restriction on how long a user can keep the movie if he doesn´t watch it.

  24.1.2004 00:44 #2

• GrayArea

  Nephilim, I'm assuming these are heavily compressed files. If you watch them on a large format TV or monitor the compression artifacts would probably be very apparent. The jerkiness and motion artifacts on regular broadcast TV bug me these days. All this for what it costs (more than it costs where I live) to rent a full resolution (less compressed...) DVD. If the .99 cent price was the going rate and not a temporary special that would seem about right to me. 4 to 5 bucks is not okay.
  
  The road to hell is paved with convenience.

  26.1.2004 10:30 #3

• runnind

  The site is solid. You'd have to be a 15-year-old to crack this website; but then, who'd want to. Most of the movies have already hit cable. And who wants to watch movies on a computer anyway.

  27.1.2004 14:06 #4

• strcruzer

  Runnind; Whats wrong with a PC? I watch all my movies on a computer...a Home THeater PC that is, and its monitor is a sharp projector with a 92" 16:9 screen with the projector running at 720p resolution.
  
  By using a HTPC you can re-scale the output of a DVD to just about any resolution you like (Dscaler and such) and create your own PVR, in a lot of cases you can do both at the same time (this depends on the PC's horsepower). Going the HTPC route provides a lot of flexibility in the long run.
  
  My HTPC also can stream content to other PC's in the house (wireless or wired, I use an 11G AP) as well as burn DVD's. so I invested in one PC with a few capture and a HDTV tuner card and now I have a true multifunction video/Multimedia processor.

  29.1.2004 09:52 #5

• pcshateme

  yeah but most of us have a 15" or 17" crt- and ive tried those movies- the resolution comes out like a VCD when put in full screen
  

  check out my site http://www.backupguides.vze.com for free software and illustrated guides on copying DVDs to DVD, to CD, and other copying stuff.

  1.2.2004 14:35 #6

• strcruzer

  It always depends on the compression method used of course. Have you tried Mpeg-4?

  3.2.2004 08:05 #7

• Maladon

  I know how to keep the movies just can convert them to a useful format for burning and have tried numers converters from freebies to adobe 6.5 to vegas dvd
  
  any thoughts

  22.2.2004 09:50 #8

• Maladon

  I know how to keep the movies just can convert them to a useful format for burning and have tried numers converters from freebies to adobe 6.5 to vegas dvd
  
  any thoughts

  22.2.2004 09:52 #9