| |
Real Superpass Review
List costs to join here...
- Superpass membership - $34.99 every three months (works out at $11.67 per month)
- 14 day free trial
- PC or Mac (RealPlayer Plus PC only)
- 10 MP3 music downloads per month
- Hundreds of movies
- Hundreds of ad-free radio stations
- A game to play and keep each month
- Exclusive live events
- News and comedy
- Watch video on your iPod
- Burn video to DVD
- Subscription includes RealPlayer Plus
- Live feed to the Big Brother house
- Exclusive TV content from major networks
- Free security and parental control software
- Turboplay feature for faster and smoother playback
- Tweak your picture quality using handy sliders
- Integrated MP3 online store
- Classic and independent movies
Real Superpass is the streaming entertainment offering from Real Networks - creator of the popular RealPlayer Software. The Real Superpass is more than just a movie download service and provides access to a variety of other content. Read on to find out what we think of it.
Let's start with the thing that annoyed us most about the Real Superpass and work from there. When arriving at the Superpass homepage you are given some vague information about what you get for signing up, but there is no other help and you can't browse their selection of content before becoming a member. The other annoyance is that every interesting looking item that you click seems to take you straight to the signup page where you are ordered to provide your credit card details before proceeding. This certainly isn't a good way to gain new customers and will put many people off before they even go for the free trial.
Once you become a member however, things do improve slightly. You are asked to download the 'plus' version of the RealPlayer and this is where most of the content is accessed from. Now the software itself is actually probably the best part of this service and would cost $39.99 if you were to buy it separately. It is essentially a souped up version of the free RealPlayer with lots of handy extra features.
If you aren't familiar with the RealPlayer software it might be worth downloading the free version to see if you like it. It is basically an all purpose media player that can handle almost any type of media file. It also helps organise your music collection and is very good at streaming content from the web. As well as the excellent usability that comes with Real products, in the plus version you get advanced CD/DVD burning, compatibility with iPods, advanced video controls and the ability to download streams from the web. It's a really useful piece of software to get free with the Superpass, but perhaps not worth its $40 price tag.
As we have mentioned the content you get access to with the Superpass is accessed through the RealPlayer software. There is actually quite a lot of content on offer, but - unfortunately for this category of reviews - not much in the way of movies. You won't find any blockbuster titles here, but there are some very good independent movies and interesting documentaries. The number of titles available is increasing on a regular basis but has yet to break the 1000 mark.
Even though we are supposed to be reviewing movie downloads here it's helpful to know the other stuff et included with a Real Superpass subscription. The best offering, in our opinion, is the 10 free MP3 downloads you get each month, supplied through Real's online MP3 store Rhapsody. You also get one free game download, but the titles, such as 'Jane's hotel' and 'Goldrush' aren't exactly well known or groundbreaking. That's not the end of it though; you also get access to premium feeds on the Real Network, which includes content from the BBC, Warner Brothers and National Geographic amongst others. Combine this with the hundreds of ad-free radio stations on offer and free security software then the Real Superpass seems to actually be quite a good deal.
The Real Superpass membership costs $34.99 every three months (there is no option to pay monthly unfortunately) and so works out at around $11.67 per month. If you were just paying this for the movie downloads we would say it's probably not worth it, but given the other content on offer it may be cost effective. For example the 10 free downloads per month would cost about $10 if bought separately. So if you were likely to buy these anyway this membership is perhaps a good idea. The fact that you can't pay monthly is a bit of a drawback though, if you decide you want to cancel your membership soon after the 3 month period begins.
In conclusion the Real Superpass is not a fully fledged movie download service. It's more of a jack-of-all-trades entertainment service with some movies added into the bundle. You will probably find one or two titles to entertain you, but if you only want movies we recommend going elsewhere. However, if you want access to some good quality radio stations, TV channels and music downloads then this is definitely an option to consider.
>> Visit Real.com Superpass Movie Downloads
or
<< Back to the rest of our Movie Download Site Reviews
|
|
|
