MOVIE
DOWNLOAD
SERVICES
Home-entertainment technology has lent new meaning to
the phrase ‘home box office,’ but can any of the new on-demand
Internet movie services really deliver the big-screen experience?
We examine the top eight options to find out
MOVIE MOVIE
The Ultimate Guide to
BY MICHAEL BROWN & WILL SMITHW
idespread broadband Internet
adoption, not to mention per-
vasive digital rights manage-
ment technology, has convinced
Hollywood studios that it’s safe to make their best
products available as digital downloads. And thanks
to Windows Media Center and devices such as Apple
TV and Media Center Extenders, including the Xbox
360, watching downloaded movies in your home the-
ater no longer requires planting a PC in your enter-
tainment center (although there’s nothing to stop you
from doing that anyway). In fact, you might not need
a PC at all.
No fewer than eight movie-download companies
have jumped into the opening that Hollywood hasprovided, all of which promise to deliver the lat-
est fi lms fresh from their runs in brick-and-mortar
theaters—TV shows, too—over the Internet. Netfl ix
eliminated late fees and runs to the video store, but
these on-demand services eliminate the need to wait
for a disc to arrive in your mailbox.
But we wanted to know how these newfangled
services compare to existing technologies, including
DVDs and Blu-ray discs and the on-demand offerings
from cable and satellite TV providers. So we brought
each of them into our home theaters, watched movies
on our big (and small) screens, tested the hardware
(when it was required), and streamed videos from
our PCs to our TVs (when it was possible) to see who
best competes with the silver screen.ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM BENTON18 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com