The Wall Street Journal-20080123-Think of an Old Film- And Chances Are Good You Can See It at Home
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Think of an Old Film, And Chances Are Good You Can See It at Home
One way to measure the march of progress is to list the human needs that can now be obtained without leaving home. Heat, water, light: All can be produced on the premises with a flick of the wrist.
The same is coming true for higher aspirations such as, say, the sudden desire to watch "300." Typically, you'd be expected to trudge down to the video store, as humans have been forced to do since what seems to be the dawn of time. But home movie viewing is being upended by the Internet, and it's happening faster than anyone would have guessed just a year or two ago.
If you like movies but haven't been following recent developments, you owe it to yourself to spend a few moments checking things out. Thousands of movies, many famous ones, are now available for your immediate viewing. Among them: "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "2001" and "Stop Making Sense."
The gratification is, indeed, instant. While writing the previous paragraph, I remembered that it has been years since I've seen David Byrne and his big suit. Now, it's a few seconds and a few clicks later, and "Psycho Killer" is filling my screen and speakers.
The few titles mentioned are courtesy of Netflix, the video-rental service whose online offering is the most interesting of any that are out there. But one has a lot to choose from, including Apple, Amazon, Movielink (now owned by Blockbuster), with more on the way.
The service from Netflix is the most striking because of how much it seems to be giving away; one wonders how long it can last. For $8.99 a month, besides the DVDs by mail, you can also have unlimited access to any of the 6,000 titles Netflix has online.
That figure is somewhat inflated by the fact that TV shows are included, with each episode counted separately. And recent releases are in short supply. Still, it's an impressive list and quite a bargain.
CinemaNow has a similar all-you-can-watch subscription plan, but it's $29.99 a month. Most of the others charge between $3 and $5 a movie, but let you download the movie and watch it on another device, like a laptop, something you can't do with Netflix.
Where do you do the actual movie viewing? That remains the rub, because much of the world regards computers as something for email, not films. Tech companies have for many years been promising some sort of "convergence" device, one that will bring this new world of online video to your living-room television set.
Me, I was tired of waiting, so I made my own converger: a retired Windows PC next to my set.
Many of the new, wide-screen sets have extra "PC," "DVI" or "HDMI" inputs into which you can plug a cable from your video card. Then, you can use an audio cable that plugs into your home theater audio receiver, if you have one, or a set of speakers. I connected a mouse and keyboard to the computer through a set of USB extension cables that let me control the machine from the recliner across the room. The room is wired for the Internet, though a Wi-Fi connection would have worked just as well.
The Netflix viewing software, like all the others, has a full-screen mode that expands the picture to fill the entire display, eliminating all vestiges of computerdom. I can watch my Internet movies just like I was playing them on my DVD player. You might laugh at the ungainliness of my hardware, but the last laugh is mine; I can watch "A Fish Called Wanda" whenever the mood strikes.
A much simpler convergence device exists in the form of the cable or satellite set-top box on your TV set. Cable and satellite companies are rapidly expanding their on-demand movie services, lest upstarts from the world of the Web make them obsolete. Their promises are just as ambitious. At the big CES trade show this month, Comcast spoke of Project Infinity, what it promises to be an ever-growing roster of on- demand movies.
In chasing this market, Dish Networks, normally a satellite provider, is taking advantage of the Internet, allowing users to plug a broadband cable into its set-top box and get movies over the Internet. The list of movies is so far quite small, but it's a start.
These Web movies are often described by the companies involved as being "DVD-quality," though in some cases, they are more compressed than DVD movies, in order to shrink their size and make them easier to transmit.
Sometimes, it shows. The title sequence of the German World War II submarine movie "Das Boot" is an underwater shot in which a submarine emerges from the cold green sea and cruises past the camera. In the Netflix version, the underwater was broken up into little tiles, like a mosaic, a tell-tale sign of excessive video compression.
The next scene, in a dance hall, looked fine, though, as did most of the rest of the movie. Vastly more objectionable than those few seconds of video compression "artifacts" was the fact that the movie was dubbed in English.
An art movie! Gott im Himmel! Why spoil a good thing?
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