5. Download Speeds

These movies were downloaded over the course of one week, each one at the same time of day. And even though I used a 54 Mbps wireless connection most of the services were fast enough that I could have watched the movie as it was downloading. In fact, all the services will let you know when you can begin watching the movie as they're downloading. In all cases I saw this notification in a few minutes. Results will vary of course depending on your connection speed and internal and external network traffic at the time of download.

Conclusions

I was impressed with the video quality of all the downloaded movies. On my computer monitor I could pick out small grains in the darker areas of the image, and just a little blurring in high motion scenes, but both of these were minor and didn't bother me as I watched the movie. An unfortunate drawback is that most of the movies you can download only have stereo sound, so surround system users will have to map the stereo signal onto the rear speakers as well to get the most out of their systems. I also viewed the movies onto my DLP projector (resolution: 1024 x 768) and watched them at incredible screen sizes. I still couldn't find much fault with the visual quality of the films. They weren't up to DVD quality standards, but they were pretty close, to the point where sometimes I couldn't tell the difference.

For the services themselves, I'd recommend both CinemaNow and Amazon Unbox. They provide impressive selections and download speeds, but have slightly more cluttered web pages. MovieLink provided the slowest download speeds of the four sites. iTunes is fun and easy to use, but lacks the compatibility that the others provide with their .WMV encoding format.

So is online movie downloading worth it? When you consider that DVDs provide better quality video, true surround sound and nifty special features, online downloads just can't compare. But for ease of use and the speed at which you can acquire them, downloading movies online is a pretty effective way to go. It's definitely faster than I expected it would be, and the video quality is still impressive. Hard core home theater owners will certainly want high quality DVDs for all their favorite movies, but if you're looking for new movies to add to your collection, try downloading them online.