Tech Lab
Online movie-streaming options may turn discs into dinosaurs
I remember visiting my local Blockbuster video store to rent “Jurassic Park.’’ These days, that place has become Jurassic Park, recalling a lost world where primitive men and women slogged through snow and rain to rent movies on shiny plastic discs.
My discs turn up in the mail now, courtesy of Netflix. And soon there will be no discs at all, thanks to an array of Internet services that pump movies directly to a TV or a computer. Netflix, Amazon.com, and others have offered such services for a while, but while it’s easy to stream Internet movies to a desktop computer, how do you get them onto your living room TV?
Netflix came up with one good answer.
In 2008, it partnered with Microsoft Corp. on a service that streams full-length movies to TV sets through Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console. The Microsoft Xbox Live subscription costs $50 a year and comes with lots of other benefits for gamers. You also pay Netflix a minimum of $9 a month, or $108 a year. For that, you can watch thousands of movies and TV shows whenever you feel like it. Netflix has 12 million subscribers, and half of them now use the movie-streaming service.
That’s partly because the Netflix connection is available through so many devices. There’s the Xbox, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Co.’s Wii game consoles, and ironically, the latest Blu-ray video disc players. I’ve been testing one: the BD-390 from LG Electronics. Priced at about $600 on Amazon.com, the BD-390 lets you run high-definition video discs and stream movies straight from the Internet.
And not just from Netflix. The BD-390’s start-up menu offers an embarrassment of riches. There’s also a link to YouTube, so you can watch an infinite number of free videos. You also get access to Vudu and CinemaNow, a couple of lesser-known but attractive Internet video stores. Each of them exploits Netflix’s most notorious weak spot: selection.
Because Netflix charges such low prices for Internet movie streaming, movie studios don’t make much money from the service, so they won’t let Netflix offer the newest releases via the Internet. It’s different with Vudu and CinemaNow. These outfits work more like cable TV pay-per-view services. You rent movies for $4 or $5, enough to provide a comfortable profit for the studios. Or you can purchase videos for $20 or so, store them up in the Internet “cloud,’’ and view them whenever you want. So the studios let Vudu and CinemaNow offer the latest releases.
In addition, Netflix offers high-definition video that tops out at 720p, the low end of HD. Vudu boasts sharper video resolution - up to 1080p with full surround sound audio thrown in. A CinemaNow spokesman told me his company’s service might also deliver 1080p, but never got back to me with confirmation, despite multiple phone calls.
Does it matter? I braved the local Blockbuster to find out, returning with a Blu-ray edition of the latest Transformers movie. The disc version looked as good as a movie about giant robots can look. The streamed Vudu and CinemaNow versions weren’t quite up to the same standard, but plenty close enough.
However, I found Vudu viewing a little easier at lower resolutions. I’ve got a fast cable modem connection, linked to the LG player through a good wireless WiFi link. Still, the connection speed sometimes wavered, causing unwelcome pauses in the robotic carnage. You can get smoother playback by setting the video quality to 720p. You can even look at videos in standard definition, but that seemed like a waste of my 46-inch HDTV.
My set is a Samsung, by the way, and blessed with still more cool tools for movie viewing. Like many newer sets, it’s got a built-in Ethernet port for Internet access, and the ability to run little software programs, or “widgets.’’ One of them lets you rent the latest movies from Amazon.com’s online video store. The Amazon widget software runs a bit sluggishly, and is tough to manipulate with the TV’s remote. And Amazon offers access to a massive library of 50,000 movies and TV shows, streamable at 720p resolution. Another on-board widget offers streaming movies from Blockbuster.
Discs aren’t doomed quite yet. Blu-ray is just taking off, after all. And a Netflix spokesman said his company fully expects to be renting discs by mail for the next 20 years. But given the plentiful options for online movie streaming, I doubt he’ll be renting them to me.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
