As consumers, today you have more choices than ever before for movies. If you wish to watch a movie at home, you can obtain it from your local video store, via mail from services such as Netflix and Blockbuster, from your Cable or Satellite Company’s video-on-demand service, and now you can also get them via a movie box, streamed across the Internet.
Driving to the video store for a movie has become an expensive proposition when you consider the cost of fuel. And although ordering movies via mail from Blockbuster or Netflix is a good deal if you watch a few movies a month, it has become a hit-and-miss proposition. I love Netflix, but lately, it seems that 30% of the movies that we receive from them are damaged and cannot be played. Netflix, however, is great about sending out a replacement if you want, but that is inconvenient and if you are like most of us who watch movies on the weekend, you have to wait for the following weekend to watch that movie.
Although many movie watchers continue to pick up movies from their local video store, the numbers are dropping as people discover the convenience of selecting and ordering a movie, right from their TV. This service has been available from your Cable or Satellite provider, but the issue has been that their offerings are extremely limited; usually 5-10 movies to select from. When you compare this to a movie box that offers immediate access to over thousands of movies available for rent and/or purchase, the Cable/Satellite Company’s movie-on-demand services seems highly inadequate.
For those of you that are new to movie boxes, a movie box is a box that connects to the Internet via your broadband connection and offers you the ability to rent and/or buy a movie from a wide selection, currently ranging from 1,000-12,000 titles, on your TV or theater. These movies can be selected by title, cover art, category, new releases, high definition releases, actors, directors, etc… Most movies have a ‘preview movie’ option available, which makes movie selection fun and convenient because you can watch the movie trailers of most movies, even movies that you never even heard of, before deciding to watch it. Most previews can be viewed full screen too. Once you opt to watch a movie, depending on your Internet connection speed, the movie may start immediately or can take up to a few minutes before you can begin to watch it. If your connection speed is 4mbps or greater, you can start watching an HD movie, as soon as you press play. If your connection is slower, it may take you a little longer before you can start and watch the movie.
The top three movie boxes in the market today are Apple TV, VUDU, and Netflix, a solid movie-by-mail provider for years. In my next post, I will talk about each movie box and tell you the pros and cons of each, based on my personal experience with these boxes.
Movie boxes offer a lot of promise and have the potential to replace Cable and Satellite in homes where TV is a low priority or where the users don’t watch real time TV and prefer to watch prerecorded programs. Most of the movie boxes are already offering the most popular prerecorded programs, which you can watch for $0.50 per program, or $34.99 for the entire season. In addition, some of these boxes give you the ability to view/watch pictures or video stored on your PC or network, on your TV of choice. I predict that some of these boxes will even venture off into offering video conferencing and gaming in the future.
Herman Cárdenas
If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com
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