Digital Joe #48

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I freely admit to throwing up just a bit in my mouth anytime I hear the word downloading in reference to movies. Maybe it has to do with my ten-year-old Dell computer, which recently died. See, no matter what I did, the thing would not play movies of any kind, streaming, downloaded or otherwise. When I bought a new laptop, that all changed. With a little trepidation, I tried out one of the video on demand services, Netflix´s Watch It Now feature.

First, you´re going to ask why Netflix. Easy enough to answer: I have a subscription to the service and get a number of hours downloaded as I spend on my monthly rate. With the $10 a month plan, I get 10 hours. Easy enough, right? (A quick glance at competitor Blockbuster Total Access shows they apparently don´t offer downloads, just in-store and by mail movies.)

Second, a word about my operating system. I´m running Windows Vista on a Gateway MT3707 Notebook, Intel Pentium Dual-Core Mobile Processor. 160 GB hard drive, 5400 RPM. If you guys know what that means, you´re smarter than I am. The guy at the store told me this was a good computer; I bought it.

Third and lastly, let me say this is a review solely of the Netflix´s Watch It Now. I have not tried out other online downloading options. So there we have it.

The first thing you´ll notice is you need to download the Netflix Free Movie Player, coming it at 1.42 MB. Shouldn´t be a problem. Mine, with a cable connection, downloaded, opened and installed inside of five minutes. But before you do that, this movie viewer only works inside Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, no Firefox (my preferred browser). You´ll also need Windows XP or Vista and a couple other technical things the Netflix site tells you about.

Netflix purports to have over 3,000 movies and TV episodes ready for download. A quick look at the television section finds a great deal, well, lacking. Hits like "Lost," "Desperate Housewives," "Grey´s Anatomy," any of the "CSI" shows, "ER," "Friends" and "Veronica Mars" are all MIA. So what is there? "The Office." "Hearts Afire." And a veritable cornucopia of titles from PBS, The History Channel, Showtime, The Discovery Channel and A&E. This is a problem. To get people to use the service, Netflix has to give them content they want to watch. Not many people are lining up to watch "The Addams Family."

The movie section fares better, believe it or not, with entries from every genre you can name. Action, Thriller, Horror, Foreign, Spiritual, Gay, Comedy. And these aren´t cheap little no-name movies, either. "THX 1138" is included. "The Hours." "The Day the Earth Stood Still." "Courage Under Fire." And a whole lot more. This is a good start, but let me stress: it´s only a start.

After choosing a movie to watch-in my case the "Masters of Horror" film "Chocolate"-it took about 10 minutes for the video to completely load. The interface is fairly straight forward: a pause/play button, minute counter, volume control and a full screen option. At first, when I hit full screen, the video looked blocky and compressed. After switching back to the original in-browser window and then to full screen, the picture was remarkably better.

In full screen mode, the control bar appears and disappears as you run the mouse over the bottom middle of the screen. When the cursor moves off it, the bar stays on screen for another couple seconds and then goes away. There were no problems with the pause/play function or with the volume control. And considering how I was watching, the video and audio held up as much as I could have expected. The picture did look a bit bright, but I´d chalk that up to my display settings and not the service.

Believe it or not, I was impressed with this new delivery method. I expected the worst and got pretty close to everything I could have wanted. Two things troubled me, though. First was the lack of subtitles or captions on this English film. Sometimes it´s just too hard to understand the dialogue and we need to be able to read the screen. Let´s not even mention potential customers who are hearing impaired or deaf.

Second, just because you watch a film online does not take it off your queue. You have to go delete it. Why can´t the Netflix system automatically take it out of your queue when the film stops playing? Or ask to take it out for you?

The only other issue I had with Watch It Now-and it´s something destined to be a problem for all downloadable content-was the lack of extras. No commentary, no featurettes, no trailers. On the positive side, the pre-movie ads were all taken away, as well as the perfunctory FBI warning about illegal exhibition or broadcast.

So will I be using Watch It Now again? Absolutely. It effectively doubles the number of movies I can watch and only requires I sit in my computer room to do so.

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