alex.moskalyuk

Associated Press reviews Starz! Movies on Real, also known as movies.real.com. I’ve signed up for the service few days after I caught the Slashdot story, since the service seemed to pretty interesting, and $12.95 (I live in Washington State, so add 8% to that) seemed like a very reasonable price for a monthly subscription.

Here’s the way it works - you have to download the latest Real Player and sign up for 14-day trial, providing your credit card right away, and they will start changing you the monthly fee as soon as the trial is over. At any given point there are exactly 100 movies available on Real Movies, and each week on Monday morning 25 leave and 25 arrive. It’s never a surprise since they make it pretty clear on both the Web site and inside the Real Player when the movie is going to expire.

You download the movie first and generally we’re talking about 600-700 MB files. The movies are single files in RMS format (Real Media Secure) and you can burn them to a CD, move them around the network, give away as gifts and what not. The catch? You must be signed in with your username and password on Real Player if you want to view the movie. You’re allowed a maximum of 3 computers, on which you can perform the sign-ins.

Once the movie is downloaded, you can view it 3 times. For the 4th time apparently you have to go to Real Web site and tell them what’s happening, as they want to make sure you’re not running a commercial cinema on their $13 a month. They call it “requesting additional licenses”. Theoretically you could just rewind the movie when the credits start at the end, but I’ve never tried it, and frankly, it’s not worth it - if you like the flick that much, buy it on DVD.

The selection is okay, nothing to wow about, but it’s also not some out-of-date or amateurish crap that other sites offer. The general principle, as I understand it, is that they publish movies that already came out on DVD. They don’t run anything that’s still in the cinemas, and nothing that just came out on DVD last week or so, in order not to compete with those sales, I assume.

What I do is generally download on my laptop, the watch it by attaching the laptop to the TV (via S-Video) and 5.1 speaker system. The quality is pretty good, it’s what you’d expect from a rental VHS tape, but it’s not DVD quality, which comes as no surprise with 600-700 MB compressed Real Video file. The Real Player itself, or Nagware Central, as it was known before, is actually pretty good, running quietly and with no ads, occasionally informing you that an expired movie that you forgot to delete, has been deleted for you.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to properly access the Real Movies site through the browser - for log on and downloading you must start within Real Player itself. Few drawbacks that I found: sometimes the movie is too quiet and requires bumping up the volume on both the computer and speaker system to higher than usual rate to properly hear the actors talk, sometimes the download stops for no apparent reason, and you have to click Restart, and sometimes Real Movies site checks your bandwidth and kicks you out for having too little of it (bandwidth, that is). The latter is pretty dumb, as I am sitting on my 3MB (supposedly) Comcast cable downlink, but I run a couple of torrents and FTP uploads in the background, and the nastyware on Real Movies site cuts me off, telling me I am not fast enough. It’s download, people, not streaming. Why do you care if it will take me 6 hours to download? I know that my FTP upload will finish running in the next 2 minutes, and you don’t. So why are you telling me how things should be done?

That’s about it. Overall, if you’re into watching movies, the price is good and beats rentals after about 3rd movie, although the selection of just 100 is definitely limiting.