Kinda neat-o and convenient. Watched a couple of movies like Children of Man and, um, Night at the Museum. $3.95 a pop and no hassles like going to the store or mailing disks back. Any of ya’ll doing the same?
Yeah. My wife and I have rented maybe 4 movies from Blockbuster in the past two years thanks to TimeWarner/Comcast On Demand. The selection isn’t great but at $4 and our rate of consumption it’s good enough. We probably watch 1-2 On Demand movies a month. Easy money for them.
Yeah, it’s definitely very convenient. I think the writing is on the wall for disc rentals.
Is it in HD?
I didn’t check.
How is this different from the pay-per-view that’s been available on DirecTV for years now? (I’m honestly asking - I don’t really know what new features have been added). Is it just that the selection is greater, or what?
The only reason why Netflix continues to make sense to me is the huge catalog they have - as soon as a digital distribution network can provide me with on-demand access to the same wide catalog, I’m all over it.
In my case, I never had anything other than cable. Now that it’s available to me, I enjoy it. I imagine the other posters are in the same boat.
Edit: Also, isn’t DirecTV PPV the sort of thing where you have to start watching when the movie is ready, instead of the movie starting when you are ready? The instant startup and primitive pause/rewind features of OnDemand were nice even before I had a PVR.
The big deal here is that I already had cable, and one day they added on-demand movies to my digital package. It’s not something I consciously chose as an alternative to Netflix or Blockbuster, it’s just there and I turn to it first because it takes about two minutes from the time the Mrs. and I agree to watch a movie for us to scroll through the list, watch a preview or two, and start the show.
Yep, basically.
Yeah, totally. And that network could be Netflix–they just added on-demand movies to their service. Currently they only have about 2000 titles, and you have to view them on your PC. But they say that they plan to enlarge the catalog, and eventually provide means for viewing these movies on just about any device that has a screen. It would be cool to have a set-top movie box that connects to your wireless network and streams/downloads Netflix (or whatever) movies to an internal hard drive, whenever you want to watch them. Sort of like the Xbox 360 media marketplace, but with a better selection and better pricing. If such a service were available, I’d never rent a disc again.
Comcast provides HD content at least…and a lot of it is free.
I find that the On Demand movies are not widescreen and generally don’t look as good as a DVD (the latter may just be snobbery on my part). Also the extras for any given movie are all lumped together with all the extras of every other movie in the “Free” section, so it takes a bit of searching through unresponsive menus in order to find the extras, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
My wife likes to order On Demand, but I’ll only agree if it’s something I don’t really care about, so for instance the other night we watched Music and Lyrics (bad acting, bad dialogue, overly forced, don’t bother) On Demand, and I immediately afterwards put in my DVD of Knotting Hill and the difference in picture quality was remarkable.
There’s very little HD on-demand unfortunately with Comcast. Most of it is crappy regular quality.
I can see how a DVD-extra addict (lol @ Dean :P) would find On Demand lacking.
Well last I checked when I had on demand the movies were not in HD and IMHO it really lowers their value. I like the ease of use but the lacking quality really gets me.
Time Warner has specific HD on-demand channels (in addition to a bunch of non-HD ones). The movies are widescreen, and the quality is as good as any HD broadcast.
Yeah, they (DirecTV) game it a bit by running their main features on multiple, time-staggered channels. But that has the side effect of seriously limiting the number of offerings.
I hadn’t thought about the whole pause/rewind thing, because I have a TiVO and the PPV content is routed through there anyway, but that’s a great point. How large is the current On-Demand catalog (how many titles, would you say)?
I dunno, 50 movies maybe? They update it every week or so. Pretty much all of them are new/recent releases.
I know the Comcast one has a ton of shit, a lot more than just movies. I’ve been watching Escaflowne since it premiered a couple of months ago, they have 4 episodes on demand a month.
The HD stuff is kinda limited though. :\ But we watched Casino Royale, as we don’t have Blu Ray, so we would have had to wait until it was out on HBO or something. The quality was great.