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Back<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n November, 2002<\/b><\/p>\n A Cheapskate’s Review of Movielink<\/b><\/p>\n by Ken Pyle<\/a><\/p>\n Anyone who knows Ken Pyle, knows that I am generally not an early technology adopter and I am, what some would call, parsimonious.\u00a0 So, I felt pretty proud to announce my use of the Movielink service at last week\u0092s TelcoTV conference.\u00a0 As you will recall, Movielink made a big publicity splash last week with their soft-launch.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, it works<\/b>.\u00a0 It is not, however, ready for the couch potato and, in my opinion, will have limited value, in its current form, to most adults who want to watch a movie at home.\u00a0 Teenagers will probably have the patience to go through the ordering process, but probably won\u0092t for various reasons.\u00a0 It could find success serving niche applications, such as providing an entertainment alternative for the frequent traveler.\u00a0 Of course, that\u0092s why the service was originally named, \u0093Moviefly\u0094.<\/p>\n I could easily envision downloading several movies in advance of a long business trip.\u00a0 With prices from $1.99 to $4.99, this service is much more reasonable than the in-room, hotel window content alternative.\u00a0 The service’s most current titles are in the same licensing window as cable pay per view. In addition to recently released titles, there are a number of older, library titles. The video and audio quality of the title I purchased was quite good, although there were a few times when the frame froze for a brief time.\u00a0 The quality of the video wasn\u0092t objectionable, however.<\/p>\n The service is fairly intuitive<\/strong> with very clear instructions.\u00a0 As it is computer based, the registration and ordering is a little more complex than with a television-based VOD system.\u00a0 One of the problems with any existing PC-based VOD scheme is the need to download some form of proprietary software.\u00a0 In this case, a software program to manage the content must be downloaded.\u00a0 I suspect that most people are nervous about downloading any kind of software to their computer.\u00a0 I probably wouldn\u0092t have done this download had I not had the professional interest.<\/p>\n After going through the log-in process, the actual movie took approximately 2.5 hours to download<\/strong> over a DSL connection (which generally runs around 400 kb\/s, although I did not measure the speed during the download process).\u00a0 The software has a resume feature, such that if the connection is lost or a hard-drive is full, the software will resume loading from the point in time in which the connection was lost or hard-drive ran out of space.\u00a0 This feature works, as I ran out of hard-drive space during the download.\u00a0 Once I cleared space on my hard-drive, it finished loading without a problem and resumed where it had stopped.<\/p>\n Some other nuances of the process and the service include:<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A user can begin viewing the movie within a 30 day period after the start of the download from the Movielink site.\u00a0 This is probably academic, but if it took a day to download, a user would effectively only have 29 days in which to view the movie.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A typical movie requires 500 to 700 megabytes of hard-drive space.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 High-speed Internet access is mandatory for the downloading of titles.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The viewer’s computer must be connected to the Internet, I believe, the first time the service is used.\u00a0 I found out that this connection doesn\u0092t have to be a high-speed Internet connection, as I only had dial-up access when I played the movie for the first time.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What I didn\u0092t have was the latest version of the player software.\u00a0 Fortunately, the download was easy and was only small enough such that it took about ten minutes.\u00a0 This counts losing the dial-up connection a couple of times.\u00a0 Fortunately, this software has a resume function, so I didn\u0092t have to reload it from scratch after losing my tether to the etherworld.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once a title is played, then the title must be viewed within 24 hours<\/strong>.\u00a0 During that period, a viewer may watch it as many times as she likes.\u00a0 Additionally, the service offers full trick-functionality (pause, rewind, fast-forward).<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once the 24-hour period is over, the movie automatically deleted from the hard-drive.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This service is strictly for use by people located in the U.S.\u00a0 The eight page Terms and Conditions <\/strong>document is a good primer on the types of restrictions the studios place on their affiliates and the subscribers of a VOD service.\u00a0 It was not clear to me, after a quick pass at this agreement, whether a user would be able to rent a movie in the U.S., and then legally watch it outside the U.S.\u00a0\u00a0 Please let me know if you want the link to these terms and conditions by sending an email to this address mlterms@viodi.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The marketing of this service will be interesting.\u00a0 Each studio sets the retail price for their titles.\u00a0 The current web site provides a very straight-forward guide for viewing what is available.\u00a0 Trailers are available on most titles and background information seems to be available on all titles.\u00a0 The trailers are streamed on demand and the quality is quite good.\u00a0 It was interesting that I was able to view the trailer with no problem, but I had to download an update of my media player to actually view the title.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I was surprised that there were no trailers either cross-promoting the service or other titles available on the service (like is done in home video), prior to the feature title.\u00a0 There may have been a trailer after the end of the title, but I didn\u0092t have time to finish the movie and didn\u0092t think to fast-forward to the end of the movie.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It will be interesting to see what Movielink does to create a \u0093sense of urgency\u0094<\/strong> for customers to get them to order movies.\u00a0 I didn\u0092t feel any sort of urgency and would have probably skipped out of the site, had it not been for my presentation at TelcoTV.\u00a0 There were a couple of options asking whether the user wants; 1) promotional material, etc. from Movielink, 2) promotional material from the individual studios.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see what materials they send.<\/p>\n \u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To be fair, this is a soft-launch.\u00a0 I am sure we will see a big marketing push in the next few months over multiple media channels. In fact, a week after ordering my first movie, Movielink sent a survey asking very detailed questions regarding their user interface, their promotional efforts and my overall experience with their service. This survey was surprisingly detailed, as it even asked the participant to watch several different trailers and judge which was more effective.<\/p>\n