Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Film on the Net?

Just got a good question: outside of the USA, is there any any reasonably-priced service (say, less than three dollars per film) which allows one to watch movies online, in decent resolution? (I'd say DVD quality or above.) And preferably cross-platform.

Torrent is a nightmare to use, and not legal. I can rent digitally from iTunes and Lovefilm and my TV service here in the UK, but the prices are obscene (like five pounds (eight dollars)) for 24 hours rental of one movie.

10 comments:

Alex said...

Didn't Amazon.co.uk offer a Netflix like service?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Not to my awareness.

Alex said...

Thinking about it again, it was an on-line disc rental, not a streaming solution. When I saw it last Netflix didn't have streaming available.

Philocalist said...

I think one of the problems here may be the existing potential market for such a service?
To watch a movie in a decent resolution, online, you need a connection that will handle it.
I'm OK most of the time, but subject to the time of day, I can still get stalls and stutters on a 50MB broadband connection!
That aside, I'd guess a very small proportion of people have their PC and TV linked, so would end up huddled around a laptop, or at best sat in front of a PC screen that is a fraction of the size they are used to watching, from chairs that are unlikely to be the comfiest in the house?
Or perhaps I'm missing something?:-)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

No, those are good points, which needs solutions.

Apple can stream me movies in viewing speed! HD! But that takes a strong server/line investment. And an Apple TV box.

Ganesha Games said...

I've been looking myself but nothing good and nothing legal. There are a few local (Italian) who are trying but their catalogue is slim at best, no recent movies, and they generally complain that it is a mess to try to secure the rights.

Europe will wake up when it is too late.

On brighter news, I just saw a TV ad for a Sony "Internet TV" which is supposed to stream content from youtube and others. So if they are trying to sell this, they must know that content is coming, I think.

dave nielsen said...

Torrent is a nightmare to use, and not legal.

Torrents are easy to use.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Some days it's been easy for me, but others there's been tons of spam on it, or it's taken hours and hours and hours just to get one audiobook.

Alex said...

Netflix to my laptop which is then connected to the TV via s-video because we have an old TV, and are using the built in video.

This has some problems:-

Not Win7/Vista so not through Media Player so no remote for pause/play. No captions.
No choice of audio language.
Stutters on the older laptops, not so bad on the newer ones.

In the US Netflix can also deliver to WII, XBox and PlayStation as well as a handful of internet capable DVR's, DVD players., bluray players and TV's. Some of these units can get other music and video services too.

Steffen said...

Voddler http://www.voddler.com/ seems to be coming to Denmark: https://voddler.telenor.dk/. I have no idea if it is any good, just saw an add for it the other day.