Blockbuster, Netflix, and on-demand cable are among the expanding number of ways to rent movies. One of the latest is MovieBeam, a jukebox for your home theater that self-stocks via an off-air antenna.
TV stations in 29 major metropolitan areas are now datacasting MovieBeam content, hidden in their regular signals. The MovieBeam player's 160-gigabyte hard drive stores about 100 flicks, a few in high-def. Depending on how new they are, the movies rent for $2 to $4; HD titles are a dollar extra. There's no subscription fee and no up-front costs beyond that of the $200 player, and you can watch a movie as often as you like within a 24-hour rental window.
Offerings stay on the hard drive for about 10 weeks, with recently arrived titles replacing the longest-stored. Half a dozen new movies are beamed to the box in any given week. All the major studios except Sony are supplying movies.
SETUP When you buy MovieBeam at a Best Buy or Sears, the player is shipped to your home preloaded with the latest titles. Placing the box near my HDTV, I connected it with an HDMI cable (not supplied), a requirement for watching HD films. (MovieBeam comes with composite-video and stereo audio cables, as well as component-video cables; for $40 extra, you can buy a kit that contains an HDMI cable and optical and coaxial digital audio cables.) I put the paperback-book-size antenna in my window and ran its cord to the player. I also attached the 25-foot phone cord to a wall jack using the enclosed splitter. Once the player powered up, a menu took me through adjusting the antenna and setting up the dial-in connection that allows MovieBeam to track and charge your purchases. The whole process took 10 minutes, after which I was prompted to call customer service and activate the account. (If keeping the phone line attached is inconvenient, you need to connect it only once every 13 days or $28 spent, whichever comes first.)
PERFORMANCE I found navigation simple using the soap-size remote. You determine the order of your movie choices: most recently arrived, alphabetical, via category, those in high-def, or the soon-to-depart. The attractive menu represents the films by movie poster or jacket art; scroll to a title, and you can view a trailer before deciding whether to rent. You can impose spending or ratings limits, but there's no X-rated content to worry about.
Controls are limited: You can fast-forward or reverse at three different speeds, put the film in slow motion, or skip ahead or back in 5-minute increments. You can't go directly to a scene as you can with DVDs, and there are few extras. When you pause a film, MovieBeam shows the remaining rental time; if you switch among multiple selections, it conveniently resumes from where you left off.
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The Short Form
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| $200 / 17 x 10 x 2.1 IN / 76 LBS / moviebeam.com / 800-668-4323 |
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Plus
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| •Simple, menu-driven setup •No subscription or late fees •Movies never out of stock |
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Minus
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| •High-def movies are old and few •TVs without HDMI are HD-incompatible •Artifacts in standard-def movies. |
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Key Features
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| •160-gigabyte hard drive stores about 100 films •Movies rent for 24 hours ($2-$4 depending on how new; $1 more for HD titles) •Selection updated weekly via encrypted over-the-air broadcasts •HDMI, component video, S-video, and composite video outputs; stereo and digital audio (coaxial and optical) outputs; RF for MovieBeam antenna; phone jack; Ethernet and USB (for future use) |
But the situation was not as rosy for the 90 percent of titles delivered by MovieBeam in standard-definition only. I observed severe artifacts during interior scenes in every SD movie I watched. Where uniform backgrounds should have been were lava lamp-like rivulets. Kitchen walls percolated. Comparing North Country via my cable system to MovieBeam's version, I didn't see any of the MovieBeam artifacts. Ditto for a similar test against Dark Water on DVD.
A spokeswoman acknowledged that MovieBeam has found a problem with the color space on HDMI outputs that causes some scenes to exhibit such artifacts, or to appear darker than they should. Despite her expectation in April that the problem would soon be fixed via an over-the-air software update, it was still evident in late June in King Kong. The purple night sky seen from the ship as it approaches Skull Island, for example, looked like an animated version of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. And the same artifacts appear when MovieBeam is connected via its component-video outputs.
BOTTOM LINE MovieBeam says that by datacasting popular titles it's able to avoid empty store shelves or online jams, no matter how huge the demand. Compared to conventional sources for movie rentals, however, MovieBeam's choice of 100 titles is paltry. And paying $200 for the MovieBeam player before you can watch your first movie is steeper than leasing a cable box or buying a DVD player.
MovieBeam's advantage seems to be in the timely delivery of recent movies in high-definition; manufacturers of the new high-def disc players probably won't be touching MovieBeam's $200 entry point anytime soon. Unfortunately, when I reviewed MovieBeam in early April there were only six full-length HD titles available, and the average age was about seven years. MovieBeam's spokeswoman conceded that its HD showcase had been limited to "library titles," but the company did add Eight Below and Annapolis, two new releases in high-def, early this summer.
That's a start, but I'd suggest MovieBeam boost the proportion of its HD offerings as well. With some tweaking of this promising platform, there's no reason MovieBeam couldn't be a high-def film lover's dream machine.
Watch The MovieBeam in action!
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