2. CinemaNow

http://www.cinemanow.com

Selection: Approximately 2200 titles, including titles for rental and purchase

CinemaNow sprinkles banners, advertisements, and navigation tools throughout the site, giving it a bit more cluttered look, but the colors and buttons give the site a more polished look and feel. Tabs across the top of the page direct you to the main navigation areas of the site, including Buy, Rent, and Burn to DVD. Within each area there are bullets on the left that let you narrow down your search by genre or studio. A quick synopsis of each movie along with file size and other details appear when you click on the movie's icon. Like MovieLink, not much is information is provided about the movie other than a short list of actors and a few sentences describing the plot. I wish that more information was provided to make it easier to decide on a movie you're not familiar with. On the good news side, movie previews are available for recent and popular titles.

The CinemaNow site has a more polished look and feel. Click on the image for a larger version.

One of the interesting features of CinemaNow is the Burn to DVD option. Certain movies can be downloaded with all included special features, menus, and even cover art and then burned to DVD for use in a standard DVD player. CinemaNow provides special software to do this that must also be downloaded. Downloading a Burn to DVD title will increase the size significantly, but some may feel that it's worth it. The price might increase for some of these movies, but nothing costs over $20.

As you'll see in the Download Speeds section below, CinemaNow turned out to be one of the fastest services. As with all the other services reviewed, the download manager allows you to start watching the movie after only a few minutes. This allows you to buy a movie and start watching within a very short period of time, while the download manager continues to download the movie in the background. Be sure you have a decently fast connection to the Internet, otherwise you'll run into some lag while watching.

CinemaNow is a great service for downloading movies and several popular TV shows. TV show episodes typically cost $2. Really, the only thing that was troubling about CinemaNow was their support pages. Their knowledge base is organized in a forum-like manner, so you might have to do some digging around to find answers to your questions, but this wasn't enough to completely turn me off to the site.