You might own the slickest cell phone, the latest Palm Pilot and the fanciest PC, but if you still are accessing the Internet on a dial-up modem, then you (like me) are living in the Stone Age and have more in common with Fred Flintstone than you might think. In the town of Bedrock, there is no room for Movielink.com.
Movielink.com caters to those who never want to leave their homes and don't mind being deprived of fresh air and direct sunlight. The site acts like an online Blockbuster. Visitors download movies after paying a rental fee of about $4 per movie. Once you download the movie, you have 30 days to watch it. But as soon as you access the film to play it, you only have 24 hours to finish watching before the file disappears from your computer.
With Movielink.com, you don't have to worry about rewinding before returning, and there are no worries about running to the rental store in the middle of the night to avoid late fees. And you don't have to wonder who is looking over your Web-surfing shoulder while downloading files from Kazaa. The Hollywood-backed and legal services Movielink offers will leave no dark spots in your conscience.
But the couch potato promise land is available only to those who have the goods: a high-speed connection to the Internet, a computer system so sleek it would make Bill Gates drool, and a Microsoft Windows platform. I have access to all three - unfortunately, not all at the same time. My computer at home could handle playing the movie, but it probably would take days to download. The service didn't even let me enter the Web site after detecting my archaic dial-up modem. I thought about watching the movie in The State Press newsroom, which has an Ethernet connection but is stocked with - yet another punch in the face - the under-appreciated Apple operating system.
Through some divine intervention, I ended up at my friend Katie's apartment to watch the movie on her fancy-pants PC, which is hooked up to COX high-speed Internet and has both a crisp flat-screen monitor and a nice sound system.
Movielink.com has a good selection of new releases and classic films but is best if you know what you want to watch. Browsing the site can be fairly tedious, and some of the movies fall into odd categories: We stumbled upon Bride of Chucky when looking for romances. After registering to use the site, entering credit card information and downloading the "Movielink Manager" (which all took about 10 minutes), we were ready to turn into mindless zombies.
The classic Breakfast at Tiffany's began to download, and we sat back in her squashy computer chairs, watching the movie from her office. We were impressed immediately with the quality of the video. Even for an old movie, there were no problems with pixilated faces or visual interferences; it was just like watching the movie on a flat-screen TV. The sound, however, left much to be desired. After turning on speakers to full blast and cranking up the volume on the "Movielink Manager," we couldn't always make out the conversation during the film and kept asking each other, "What did he say?" or "What was that?" Even the hum of the air conditioner drowned out some of the sound.
Movielink allows you to start watching a movie even if the entire file isn't downloaded, which is a plus if you are impatient. However, during the middle of the movie a window regularly appeared in the corner of the screen, along with an extremely loud sound effect (magnified by the speakers being cranked up full volume), signaling that the file was downloaded completely. We already were struggling to hear the movie as it was - being scared out of our chairs by the blaring beep wasn't too pleasant either.
If you're too lazy to schlep out to the nearest Blockbuster, and if you've got the high-tech goods to enjoy, then Movielink.com is certainly worth a try. But, if you don't have access to such luxuries and would watch a film while sprawled out on the couch rather than squished into a computer chair, I would hold off on packing away the VCR or DVD player.
Yabba-dabba-doo.
Reach the reporter at lynh.bui@asu.edu.
