Movielink

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Product summary

The good: Movielink lets you rent more than 1,400 titles or purchase more than 300 titles from your home computer, and it includes plenty of new releases and classics. Progressive downloading lets you start watching a movie before it's finished downloading.

The bad: You can't burn purchased movies as standard DVDs or transfer them to portable devices, which means you can view them only on authorized computers. Downloading took far longer in our tests than we expected. The service doesn't offer a subscription plan and doesn't work with Macs, and the movie catalog is far smaller than that of its main rival, CinemaNow, although larger in mainstream Hollywood and independent movies.

The bottom line: Movielink is a good rainy-day friend for when you really don't feel like a trip to the video store, but we're not sold on purchasing movies online with so many restrictions.

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Reviewed by: Troy Dreier
Edited by: James Kim

Reviewed on 4/18/06 Release date: 4/3/06 Hollywood is notoriously concerned with piracy, so Movielink, an online movie rental and purchase store owned by the studios themselves (MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. are partners), is not exactly a model of open-source development. On April 3, Movielink became one of the first sites--along with CinemaNow--to allow online purchase of major studio films. In fact, the store offers some titles on the same day they're released on DVD. It sounds great, but before you trash your BitTorrent client and start downloading, you should know about the heavy restrictions in place.

Launched in 2002, Movielink is one of the early birds of online film rentals. It currently offers more than 1,400 titles (heavy with new releases) for rent and more than 300 for purchase. That's far smaller than the 4,000-plus feature-film rentals CinemaNow offers (although Movielink has more quality selections) but more than newcomer Vongo's roughly 860 titles. Rentals generally cost $4 to $5 each, and purchases fall between $18 and $28, which we think is a bit steep for a digital movie. For example, Brokeback Mountain, which CinemaNow does not stock as of the time of this writing, costs $26.99 to purchase. Amazon has the same title on DVD for about $17. Unlike Vongo, Movielink doesn't offer a subscription service, but there are bargains to be had, including some $1.99 rentals.

The Movielink main page, highlighting new releases.

The browser-based store is a model of simplicity, with a tabbed interface showing you either the rental or purchase libraries. The site works with Windows 2000 and XP only (sorry, Mac fans), and users need to first download the Movielink Manager, which handles downloading, permissions, and playback. Besides new releases, Movielink has a nice assortment of classics and nonmovie features, such as National Geographic videos and BBC productions. Left-column navigation lets you browse by genre, or you can use the search box at the top. Once you've found a movie, you can read a description or watch the trailer online. Some titles have preview clips but not many. The site even offers a few free titles, but they're mostly making-of featurettes on mainstream movies.

The Movielink Manager keeps tracks of downloads and shows their status.

Rentals need to be watched within 24 hours of when you start to play them, then they expire--although they don't self-delete, in case you want to rent them again. Purchases never expire, but you can't burn a standard DVD from your purchased movie; you can burn a backup DVD with the film only in DRM WMV format. That means the movie will play only on an authorized computer, which is a huge drawback and far too restrictive for our tastes. Most movies can be played on three PCs, but that number varies, which shows that the people behind Movielink don't understand why the iTunes Music Store is so successful. (You should check a movie's information page before purchasing to see how many computers it can be played on.) Neither rentals nor purchased movies can be played on portable devices, which gives CinemaNow a huge advantage.

A movie-purchase information page, showing the price and the number of PCs the movie can be played on. This title was available for online purchase the same day the DVD hit stores.

Movielink's rental section offers weekly specials.

You can play Movielink movies on your television but only if your PC and TV are connected (with video cables or a wired or wireless Windows Media Center PC connection). Movielink offers a page instructing users how to set up such a connection, but most of the support document links were broken at the time of this writing.

When you're signed in, you can save titles that interest you to your own wish list. Movielink offers progressive downloading so that you can start watching your film before it fully downloads, but it wasn't a huge time-saver in our testing. The site advertises that you'll be watching in 2 to 10 minutes, but it was between 30 and 50 minutes in our tests over a cable Internet connection. Downloading movies took us longer than the movies themselves: A 106-minute movie took 135 minutes, and a 115-minute movie took 139 minutes. A technical-support rep thought our wireless connection might be slowing the download, although we had average download speeds of 1,200Kbps. Downloads take about 1GB of storage per movie.

We experienced one glitch while downloading, where the download froze. That gave us a chance to try the live-chat help, which is accessible through the browser. After a 2-minute wait, a helpful support person was there to fix our problem; we needed to choose Relaunch Movielink Manager from Start > All Programs > Movielink, which reawakened the connection. Movielink also offers support documents and FAQs.