V
ongo’s subscription business model
puts it in a category all its own: The
service’s primary focus is to provide
an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of movies
and other video content that can be down-
loaded to your PC for a $10 monthly fee. It
doesn’t offer any for-purchase content, and
its TV offerings are nearly nonexistent.
Vongo is a division of Starz
Entertainment, which has contracts with
all the major Hollywood movie studios for
semi-exclusive access to their fi lms—but
only after those movies have played out
in theaters, the pay-per-view market, and
as disc sales. Starz offers the same fi lms
on cable TV. A Vongo representative tells
us these contracts cover about 40 percent
of all Hollywood movies released in the
last nine years. HBO is in a similar posi-
tion, but that fi rm doesn’t currently offer a
download service.
When we compared Vongo’s movie
library to the rest of the fi eld, we did indeed
fi nd that Vongo had many movies to offer
that could not be rented online anywhere
else. CinemaNow, Movielink, and others had
them available for sale, but not for rent. And
with Vongo, you can watch the content as
often as you like—or for at least as long as
Vongo has the right to offer it.
There is no free lunch, however, espe-
cially not in Hollywood: When we looked
to Vongo for 25 of the latest releases, we
found only one that was covered by the
monthly subscription price and only one
other that was available on a pay-per-view
basis. Vongo also doesn’t have much in the
way of classic fi lms (nothing from the AFI’s
top 25 list, for instance), and we didn’t fi nd
any of our 10 cult classics in its listings.
We did fi nd some other gems, includingDr. Strangelove, From Dusk Till Dawn , and
a host of low-brow offerings from Troma
Entertainment (the studio that brought you
Toxic Avenger ).
You’ll need to download the Vongo cli-
ent in order to browse the service’s library,
download content, and watch previews.
The application has a search engine that
enables you to fi nd content by title, actor/
director, category, format (standard or
widescreen), MPAA/TV rating, language,
and device (PC or portable). You can also
search for subscription content, pay-per-
view titles, or both.
Vongo’s movie and (limited) TV offerings
are delivered in the equivalent of standard
defi nition (roughly 480i or 480p, dependent
on your display) in WMV format. Video qual-
ity, as scaled by the Radeon 3850 video-
card in our home-theater rig to our 42-inch
ViewSonic N4285p TV, was very good. Being
limited to standard defi nition isn’t a major
shortcoming now (since most of the movies
in Vongo’s library predate HD video anyway),
but it will become a drawback as today’s
new releases are remastered for Blu-ray
before making their way into Vongo’s library.
Downloaded content can be streamed
over a Windows Media Center Extender
to a TV (assuming you have a version ofWindows that includes Media Center), but
Vongo’s 10-foot user interface is also inte-
grated into versions of Vista that include
Windows Media Center. This means you can
use a Media Center remote to control the
Vongo client.
Like your movies on the go? Vongo’s
service can be used on as many as three
devices simultaneously. One of these must
be a PC, but the other two can be either
PCs or Vongo-certifi ed portable video
players (including the Archos 605 WiFi,
Creative Labs’s Zen Vision: M, and Toshiba’s
Gigabeat V.)
If you can wait a year or so for movies to
fi lter through the system and into the Starz
library, $10 per month for all the movies you
can watch is a great deal. We’re not that
patient, although we were reminded of a
number of fi lms that we’d forgotten to watch
when they were new—and now they can’t
be rented from the other services.32 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
Vongo
The all-you-can-eat movie buffet
Vongo has both a 10-foot user interface that’s integrated into versions of Vista that
include Windows Media Center and this close-up user interface for watching movies
on your PC.Vongo movies can be streamed to your
TV using any Windows Media Center
Extender device, including the Linksys
DMA2200.VERDICT7
Subscription: $10 per/mo
Movie rentals: $1 to $
Movie purchases: N/A
TV episodes: $
http://www.vongo.comDOWNLOAD
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