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Filed under: Internet, Video

Best Buy + CinemaNow = sitting in a tree

CinemaNow
US electronics retailer Best Buy is preparing to enter the digital video distribution business in a big way. The company is partnering with CinemaNow, an online video download service that lets users rent and purchase movies and TV shows.

Best Buy will load up CinemaNow software on internet-connected consumer electronics sold at the company's retail stores. That includes computers, portable media players, Blu-Ray players, set-top boxes, mobile phones, and internet-connected television sets.

Customers that purchase one of these items will be able to rent or buy videos from a catalog with about 22,000 titles. Movie purchases typically run between $10 and $20, while TV shows are $1.99 per episode. Movie rentals typically go for $2.99 to $3.99.

The move should give Best Buy and CinemaNow a much stronger foothold in the digital media space. CinemaNow already offers a pretty compelling user experience, allowing you to download a video and watch it on up to three devices. But the fact that virtually every consumer electronics device that Best Buy sells that can run the software soon will, means that CinemaNow is about to become a much bigger name in digital media, and that could help the companies take on Apple's iTunes and Amazon's video on demand services.

Best Buy is expected to roll out the new service early next year.

Filed under: Video, Web

Online movie site CinemaNow sold for $3 million

CinemaNow
Long before Hulu, or even YouTube were offering online video, and long before Apple or Amazon were selling digital downloads of TV shows and feature lenght films, there was CinemaNow and MovieLink. The two sites may have been well ahead of their time, but they also never managed to get the kind of attention that newer online video sites have garnered. Last year Blockbuster purchased MovieLink for about $7 million. And this week, software firm Sonic Solutions picked up CinemaNow for just $3 million.

CinemaNow has a library of about 6,000 movies and TV shows. Sonic Solutions hopes to leverage CinemaNow's technology and assetts to expand its service that allows you to download videos and burn them to DVD.

[via paidContent]

Filed under: Internet, Video

CinemaNow comes to Windows Media Center

CinemaNow MCE

Once upon a time if you wanted to (legally) download Hollywood movies or TV shows, you turned to sites like MovieLink and CinemaNow. With all the attention focused on Apple, Amazon, Joost, and Netflix these days, we kind of forgot that these companies still existed. And then we got a friendly email from CinemaNow letting us know that starting today you could access the service through Windows Media Center, which is actually kind of awesome.

You'll need to register for a CinemaNow account to use the service. And of course, you'll need Windows Media Center, which is built into Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate. You should be able to find the CinemaNow icon in the More TV section. If you don't see it, go into your Media Center settings and force your computer to download updates.

CinemaNow is actually kind of late to the game here. MovieLink and Vongo have had Windows MCE applications for ages. But with CinemaNow making its 3400 feature length films, 3000 TV episodes, and 2900 music videos available, we're going to say better late than never. Now if only Amazon, Apple, and Netflix would release Widnows MCE applications.

Update: As we've been reminded, this is not the first time you've been able to access CinemaNow from Windows Media Center. The company released a plugin for earlier versions of MCE which you could download and install in order to watch movies using the media center "10 foot interface." To our knowledge, this is the first time CinemaNow has been available to all Windows Vista MCE users without a separate download though.

Filed under: Video

Is it worth downloading movies legally?

Amazon Unbox
There are roughly a billion services offering you ways to legally download movies and television shows from the internet. But the thing is, most of them still pale in comparison to illegal BitTorrent downloads in terms of selection and quality.

Still, the folks at PC Magazine wanted to take a look at the current state of legal movie downloads. They spent a week with some of the top sites, including iTunes, CinemaNow, MovieLink, Vongo, Amazon Unbox, and MovieFlix.

In a nutshell, Amazon Unbox has the highest quality movies, CinemaNow is the only service that lets you burn videos to DVD, and MovieFlix is cheap, with a subscription of just $7.95 a month, but the selection is mostly older movies.

Read more →

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