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Blockbuster Online Movie Downloads Review
- Prices vary depending on the title
- Rental Movies
- New releases - $3.99
- Older titles - $2.99
- Movies to buy
- Prices range from $9.99 to $19.99
- Rent 25 movies and get a free media player
- Windows only, no Macs
- US only
- Purchase pre paid cards in stores around the U.S
- Give gift certificates for downloading or renting movies
- Store rental movies for up to 30 days
- Watch rental movies as many times as you want in 24 hours
- Watch movies as you download them
- Watch movies directly from your TV
- Download movies to keep
- Transfer movies to a portable player
- No membership fees or late fees
- Stream movies to an Xbox
- Watch trailers and read customer reviews of movies
- Similar movies feature to introduce you to new movies
- Feature-length movies only take about 1 hour to download with a fast connection
- Start watching movies before they are fully downloaded
- Full screen and high quality video
- Over 1000 hollywood titles to choose from
- Media manager software to help download and watch movies
Retail movie giant Blockbuster now offers movies to download from its website. As you would expect from such a major player in the DVD movie business, the service is first rate and there is a wide selection of titles on offer. Just a couple of small niggles keep it from reaching the top spot in our top ten list.
The first thing you will notice about Blockbuster is the speed and ease of use of their web site. It incorporates loads of useful little features for navigating the site and finding the content you want. If you have used the Blockbuster website before you will instantly be familiar with the download section as it integrates with the rest of the site. If you haven't used it read on while we enthuse about some of its best features.
One of our favourites is the ease in which you can browse the movies available. Let's face it, when we go to rent a movie we usually don't have any idea what we will take home until we get there. That's why the features Blockbuster provides are so useful. Movies are all displayed as thumbnails of the DVD box cover and when you hover over the picture a bubble pops up giving you a synopsis of the movie. If you like the sound of it there are also links to the dedicated page for that movie which provides trailers, cast listings, member reviews and more. This is where you will also find the really handy feature which gives you suggestions on similar movies to the one you are looking at.
As well as browsing you can also search for specific movies based on the title, who directed it, who starred in it and a variety of other parameters. We liked the fact that you can search for films of a certain genre, but within a certain age rating. That means if you fancy a scary film, but not too scary, you can easily find it! One slight quibble we had was that you couldn't search across only the movies available for download. That means if you search for a certain movie and get a result, the movie might only be available for postal rental or in-store pickup. However, this isn't too much of a problem because you can still browse the section dedicated to movie downloads.
The software Blockbuster provides for downloading and managing your movies is as easy to use as the web site. After a small download the manager is installed on your system and places an icon on your desktop. Clicking this gives you access to all the movies you have bought or rented through the Blockbuster web site. The software will only download one movie at a time but you can store as many as you have room for on your hard drive and organise which to download first if you pay for more than one.
As well as making organising your movies a breeze the download manager has another couple of nifty tricks up its sleeve. If you have an Xbox 360 hooked up to your home network a few clicks will send any downloaded movie streaming to it so that you can watch it on a TV. Of course you can still use a cable to connect your PC to the TV but who still does that in this wireless age! If you would prefer to take your movies on the move you can also transfer them across to your portable player. At present only the Archos 605 is supported but Blockbuster assures more devices will be supported soon.
All of the movies you download are very high quality (1500K), but not quite DVD quality so as to keep the file size down. That means most movies are around 1GB and will take around about an hour to download with a fast broadband connection. This is in line with all other movie download providers and you will hardly notice the difference between the quality of your download compared to that of a DVD.
In terms of DRM and what you are allowed to do with the movies you download Blockbuster offers pretty much the same deal as most of these providers. Anything you rent you may store on your PC for up to 30 days but after the first time you watch it the movie will become unusable after 24 hours - although during the 24 hours you can watch it as many times as you like. Anything you download to buy is yours to keep, but you can only watch it on one PC. This isn't quite as good as some other providers which support playing certain movies on up to three PCs, but Blockbuster is sure to provide support for that soon.
The DRM protection used is Microsoft's Windows Media DRM and so compatibility with most Microsoft products shouldn't be an issue. This type of DRM requires you to have an electronic license for each film you download, but this is all handled by the download manager so that you don't have to worry about it. The only drawback is that you may sometimes have to connect to the internet to let the software renew licenses for the movies you own.
The prices per download are very reasonable for both downloading and renting movies from Blockbuster. They all vary depending on title, but generally you can rent a new release for $3.99 and older titles for $2.99. Titles to buy vary from $9.99 to $19.99 and average around $17.99 for a new release.
There really isn't much to choose between the two big players at the top of our movie downloads list. Their prices are very similar and the quality of movies offered is exactly the same. However we think Blockbuster lets itself down slightly by not supporting multi-pc playback or the wide range of playback devices supported by its main competitor. That said, the service is still top notch, the range of movies excellent and the software easy to use. We would highly recommend Blockbuster movie downloads to anyone asking!
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