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CinemaNow Review
CinemaNow.com is our top ranking music subscription service and winner of our No1Reviews.com No. Choice Award! For 100% legal movie downloads we think CinemaNow can't be beat!
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- USA - full range of titles
- UK - limited range of titles depending on licensing
- Worldwide - limited range depending on licensing
- 3 day free subscription trial
- Subscription Membership
- $29.95 per month for access to free content (does not include hollywood titles)
- $99.95 per year for access to free content (does not include hollywood titles)
- Pay per view/download
- Rental movies typically cost $2.99 to $3.99
- To keep movies typically costs $9.95 to $19.99
- Windows only, no Macs
- Purchase pre paid cards in stores around the U.S
- Give gift certificates for downloading or renting movies
- Watch movies on your Xbox
- Watch movies directly from your Tivo
- Watch movies as you download them
- Download movies to keep
- Watch rental movies as many times as you want in 24 hours
- Stream movies to your TV
- Burn movies to DVD
- Stream movies to a variety of other home entertainment systems
- Watch movies on a variety of portable devices
- Customer generated reviews of movies to help you make your choice
- Parental controls to prevent children seeing movies they shouldn't
- Comprehensive search facilities
- Rent movies for as little as 49 Cents
- Feature-length movies only take about 1 hour to download with a fast connection
- Full screen and high quality video
- Subscribers get unlimited access to certain content
- Over 1400 hollywood titles to choose from
- Media manager software to help download and watch movies
In the emerging market of legal online movie downloads CinemaNow has set itself out to be a cut above the rest. Its wide selection of movies and the vast array of different devices they can be played on make it stand out from the competition and belong at the top of our top 10 list.
On arriving at CinemaNow's elegantly designed main page you are instantly shown a selection of new releases on offer, which is handy if you aren't quite sure what you want to watch. From there you are provided with two main sections of the site for renting or buying movies. These two sections can be browsed by category or searched based on a variety of different factors. We particularly like the fact that you can search based on the director of the film or the actors in it.
At over 1400 titles CinemaNow has one of the largest selections of any provider in our top ten and new releases are added every Tuesday. However, that's still not as many as you are likely to find in your local video store. Movie downloads are still a fairly new area so you can expect the number of titles on offer to increase pretty quickly. Subscribers get access to extra titles, but these are mostly obscure foreign films and documentaries which we hadn't heard of. Subscribers also get free access to what is ambiguously titled the 'unscripted' section. Let's just say these are the types of titles you will want to be blocking out with the parental controls if you have kids!
The software CinemaNow provides for downloading, watching and managing your movies is top notch. It's a small download that you must install on your system (Windows only unfortunately), but provides lots of handy features for making the most of your downloads. It's also very simple to use so you don't need to worry about accidentally deleting your movies or licenses!
We think one of the best features, which the software will help you set up, is the range of devices that you can watch your downloaded movies on. You can watch on your laptop or desktop PC and connect this to a TV as you would with any other media, but that's not where it ends with CinemaNow. You can also watch movies directly through your HP Mediasmart TV or your Tivo DVR. This bypasses the need for a computer altogether - which is much easier if you are trying to organise a romantic evening for a new date, or even just trying to keep the kids quiet for a while!
However, even if you aren't the stay-at-home kind of person CinemaNow has an option for you. With each 'buy' download you get one 'synch' license which entitles you to download a version of the movie optimised for portable devices (So it's smaller file size but less quality). You can then transfer this to a supported portable media player and watch the movie on the go.
If all that sounds promising you will no doubt be starting to wonder how this all works. You probably don't need to know this stuff to make the most of CinemaNow, but it's helpful to know what you can and can't do with it.
The movies you download are all very high quality - encoded at between 1200K and 1500K - which means it's not quite DVD quality but the file size is kept to around 1Gb for faster downloads. Anything you do download, to rent or to buy, will have to be stored on your hard drive so make sure you have space before you begin. CinemaNow does not offer streaming video as we know it, but it does allow you to start watching the movie before it is fully downloaded. The best way to do this is to start it playing after a few minutes of downloading so that there's a bit of leeway if your internet connection plays up.
As with any online media provider there is the issue of DRM and licensing of the content you download. CinemaNow provides you with WMV files that can be watched with Windows Media Player, and are compatible with most Microsoft products, providing you have the correct license for the file. The licenses are all handled behind the scenes with the handy download manager software so you don't need to worry about them, but it means you will need to connect to the internet occasionally so that they can be renewed.
Depending on whether you rent or buy the movie, the license allows you to do different things with it. Rental movies can be kept for 24 hours after the movie is first played and during that period you can watch the movie as many times as you want. Movies to buy are yours to keep, but you may only watch them on up to three different PCs. Throughout the site CinemaNow talks about a burn to DVD feature, but it seems this has been discontinued - probably due to licensing issues.
The cost of downloading movies with CinemaNow is very reasonable. New release rental movies come in at around $3.99, while older titles can be found for $2.99 or less. To buy new releases the price varies quite a bit depending on the title, but we couldn't see any more expensive than $19.99. The membership options at $29.95 per month or $99.95 per year don't offer much benefit apart from access to the free content - much of which is of an adult nature.
CinemaNow is one of the biggest players in the movie download market and deservedly so. It has the biggest selection of movies of all the sites we reviewed and reasonable prices to back it up. The download manager software is simple yet powerful and the quality of movies is as good as you'll find on the web. If you aren't in the US you should check the movies you want are available in your region before signing up, but otherwise we say go for it!
>> Visit CinemaNow.com
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