We all have a ton of DVDs laying around, and have no way to really keep track of them all digitally. Sure, there are services out there who have come and gone that promised to store your precious information once you've taken days and days to enter them.
Here comes another, called IHeartMovies.org. We want to preface this by saying that you should always look into the background of web apps and feel free to contact the company to see if you feel like they're in it for the long haul. Nobody likes putting info up, only for the company to dissapear in a week or month.
Having said that, IHeartMovies aims to be a social network for you and your friends (and people all over the world) to share your likes as far as movies go. Great idea, let's jump right into the features.
Rate Titles
Break your collections down into lists (TV or Film)
Check out your collections in multiple views (full description and icon view, or quick list)
Full search of your lists, others lists, and sitewide information
Share movie likes and dislikes on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Google
Pretty standard stuff, right?
But it's all in the presentation here. When you log in, you're presented with a pretty neat dashboard that will show you whatever you want to see based on your interests. Things like what your friends have added and quick surveys.
With this type of format, we really hope that IHeartMovies Hearts us and stays up with things, and that means adding more functionality and more widgets. It's an ajaxified and friendlier IMDB.
Post your lists in the comments so we can see what kind of wacky movies you like.
Netflix users are in an uproar, and rightfully so.
If you're not familiar with what Netflix is, then sorry...please move along.
Kidding...you can rent movies online, and you can create a queue of what you want to see, and they'll mail them to your house as they're available. It's like an autopilot feature and it frakkin rocks.
A few months ago the company put out an even cooler feature that let Netflix account holders create multiple queues under one account. So basically your baby daughter, mom, uncle Steve, and your parrot Whiskers could have their own queue of movies that they want to see.
Such a time saver, such a great function that really reminds you why you use and love (and pay for) Netflix.
Don't go and try to sign up just for that feature though, because Netflix just announced that they're taking it away.
Want to know if a movie's worth checking out? You could read reviews written by people you've never met. Or you could ask a friend or two who has already seen the movie. or you could ask a few thousand Twitter users. FlixPulse takes the latter approach.
FlixPulse is sort of like Rotten Tomatoes. But instead of compiling average ratings from dozens of professional movie reviews, FlixPulse scans Twitter for mentions of current movies. Then real live human beings look at each tweet and decide whether the comment was good, bad, or indifferent. The result shows up as a percentage on the main page, and if you click on a movie title you can read the actual messages left by Twitter users.
The concept is kind of cool. But since most people probably don't realize that their remarks are being aggregated, it's not clear that random Twitter users are providing accurate reviews. Every movie on the front page of FlixPulse has a score well above 50%, which means that either every movie in theaters right now is awesome, or people are more likely to comment on films they liked.
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.
Comcast-owned media portal Fancast has announced that it will soon have full length streaming episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and South Park. Up until now, if you wanted to get your Daily Show or Colbert Report fixes online, you had to check out clips with segments from the shows on their official websites, or hunt through YouTube. Fancast will be the first site we're aware of that will let you watch episodes from start to finish.
Comcast introduced Fancast last fall. At the time it was more of an IMDB style site with information about movies, TV shows and actors, directors, and other artists. But over the last half year, Fancast has added a decent selection of streaming movies, TV shows, and clips through partnerships with CBS, Hulu, and other media distributors.
Much to everyone's amazement, Hulu doesn't suck. Seriously. When Fox and NBC first announced plans to get into the online video streaming business, a lot of commenters spent a lot of time talking about how silly it would be to take on YouTube. And then Hulu started showing full length movies and TV shows with minimal advertisements. The video quality is fairly good, and the content library includes things you might actually want to watch. Now, just two months after publicly launching, Hulu reports that:
The site has served up more than 63 million video streams
The average Hulu user watches 2 hours of Hulu video each month
Hulu is now the top network video site
Hulu has also launched a distribution deal with TV.com today, and plans to start streaming video through TVGuide.com, Break.com, Zap2it, BuddyTV, Flixter, and MyYearbook in the next few weeks.
Now for the bad news. Hulu is still completely unavailable to anyone outside of the US.
Remember Lycos? Once upon a time they were a search engine and internet portal, just like Google and Yahoo! And today they're... well, actually they're still around, much to our surprise. And today the company launched its most interesting product in ages: an online video site with a social twist.
When you start watching a movie in Lycos Cinema, you can invite friends to watch along with you, no matter where they are. The video will play back on all of your computers at almost exactly the same instant. So users can chat about the movie in real-time as they watch. The person who starts the movie can pause, rewind, and fast forward the video stream. And the controls are almost instantaneous. If you've got a broadband connection, you can skip ahead to the end of a movie in just a matter of seconds, with no buffering.
The site features both free and paid content. When you rent a movie, you can pay one fee for a one person rental, another for "5 seats," and the top price for "10 seats." The prices seem reasonable, topping out at around $6 for 10 seats. But there's one major problem. The content sucks. We're talking, makes Joost, and even Babelgum look good sucks. The most exciting thing we could find in the free content was a Godzilla movie. The rental store content is about as fresh, with titles like Convoy and Monster from a Prehistoric Planet in the featured content section. You can imagine what the non-featured content looks like.
There's no question that it's faster to purchase a movie from the iTunes store than your local video store -- assuming you have a speedy internet connection. But if you want to get the latest releases as son as they're out on video, you're probably better off making the trek to the video store. Or at least that's what we would have told you yesterday, when it could take weeks or months longer for movies to show up on iTunes. But now Apple has announced that many movies will be available on iTunes the same day as they are released n DVD.
Apple has reached deals with Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate, Image, and First Look. That covers a lot of territory. New releases will typically set you back $14.99. The press release doesn't make it clear whether this applies to the $2.99 movie rentals, so if you want to rent a video for just a few bucks, you might still better off using Netflix or walking to a bricks and mortar store.
Online video site Hulu emerges from private beta tomorrow. Of course, we'll forgive you if you didn't realize the service was in private beta. The site has given away thousands of invites, and users can easily embed videos on other sites, which has led to a cottage industry of Hulu cloning.
Over the past month, Hulu says its videos have been streamed over 5 million times, either from Hulu.com or from other sites, including Hulu clones and content partners like AOL and MSN.
When Hulu launched, it was basically a content distribution outlet for NBC and FOX. For the past few months,. Hulu has been busy signing additional content partnership deals, and tomorrow Hulu will add content from Warner Brothers, Lionsgate, and a whole slew of other networks and studios including sports content from the NBA and NHL.
All the content is professionally produced. Hulu ain't no YouTube clone, it's a place to watch full length movies and TV shows complete with 15 and 30 second advertisements. We've been checking it out during the private beta, and we've been pretty happy with the selection and video quality. We'd be a bit happier if Hulu would make entire seasons of TV programs available instead of just a few episodes at a time. But that would probably eat into DVD sales.
One of the things that makes Ubuntu such a popular Linux distribution is that it comes with a ton of useful applications preinstalled. When you first boot Windows, you may have Windows Media Player, and Internet Explorer but you need a separate application suite if you want to create and edit spreadsheets, databases, or Word documents. Ubuntu, on the other hand includes a media player, web browser, office suite, and a few other goodies.
But one thing that you can't do with a stock Ubuntu installation is play commercial DVDs. While the Totem movie player will certainly make a valiant effort at playing the video on any DVD you stick in your computer, it won't manage to bring up DVD menus and may have problems playing the video. It turns out it's very easy to enable DVD playback. Just open a terminal and type the following two lines (entering your root password when prompted):
Or if you'd rather not play around with the terminal, you can open the Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for VLC. The VideoLan media player is capable of playing DVDs without any tweaking.
Hulu may have an amazing selection of videos from Fox and NBC available for streaming on the web. But there are at least two problems with the service right now:
Hulu is in private beta, meaning you can only access videos if you have an account or if someone's been kind enough to embed the video player on their site.
You have to search through videos using a mouse and keyboard as if you were looking up directions, not using an on-screen program guide like you would with a TV.
Hulu Media Player attempts to deal with both of those problems. Paul Yanez, the guy who brought us a browser-based Joost clone, plus an Apple-TV inspired video player for all sorts of web video content.
Hulu Media Player is still a little rough around the edges. For example, we found that we would occasionally click on one episode of a TV show only to have a different one start playing. And once you're watching a video, there's no way to go back to the list of episodes for that particular TV show. Instead, you have to click the "show guide" button which takes you back to the main menu. And it'd be nice if you could control the player using your keyboard instead of a mouse. But it's still a pretty neat twist on Hulu.
While you don't need a Hulu beta account to access Hulu Media Player, only a small portion of the Hulu library is available for viewing right now.
As had been widely expected, Apple today announced the availability of video rentals from the iTunes Store. Up until now you could only buy movies and TV shows, with no lower-priced rental option. Competitors like MovieLink, CinemaNow, and Amazon Unbox have been offering rentals for some time now, but none has become the household name that Apple's iTunes is.
Steve Jobs announced the move during his Macworld keynote today. Rentals are available starting today and about 1,000 films should be available from the iTunes store by the end of February. Apple will charge $2.99 for regular titles, $3.99 for new releases, and a dollar more for HD content.
Movies will be viewable for up to 24 hours, and you can start watching 30 seconds after your download begins (assuming you have a fast internet connection). Probably the coolest feature is that you'll be able to transfer rentals to an iPod or iPhone for viewing on the go. While other services offer portable viewing options for purchased movies, this is the only way to rent a movie and take it with you on an iPod.
In related news, Apple and Fox have announced a partnership to include digital copies of movies that you can manage with iTunes on all DVDs the studio releases.
The Financial Times is reporting that Apple has struck a deal with Fox to bring video rentals to the iTunes store. While we've been hearing rumors for a while that Apple would start offering a rental option (right now you can either pay to "buy" TV shows or movies or take your business elsewhere), we find the Fox deal a bit puzzling.
Why? Because Apple has a strong relationship with Disney, which is the only studio currently offering new release DVD titles for sale via iTunes. So if Apple wanted to get into the video rental business, we would have expected Disney titles to be available at launch.
Of course, the Financial Times reports Apple and News Corp both declined to comment on the deal. While the paper's sources are saying that Fox movies will be available soon, perhaps we'll see video rentals from other studios as well?
Apple is hardly the first online video distributor to offer movie rentals. Amazon, CinemaNow, MovieLink, and other services have been offering downloads that self-destruct after a limited time for ages. But Apple is still probably the biggest name in online video sales, so if the company could shake up the young market if it makes the leap into lower-priced rentals.
We can probably expect an official announcement, or at least a few more details, in a few weeks.
You've just laid out the scratch for a new 42" HDTV, hooked up surround sound speakers, and you're ready to tuck into a bowl of popcorn. Now all you need are some movies. Well, you've come to the right place.
Here are five great Web sites where you can legally download free movies and burn them to a DVD to watch with your sweetie, family, and friends this weekend.
The Internet Archive - This is the motherlode for all kinds of free media (it's even got video games). The Archive has loads of old movies, foreign films, documentaries, and more. There's even a couple of movies about ice cream (hey, we just blog about this stuff -- we can't explain it either).
Emol - If comedy and cartoons are what you're after, Emol.org is the place to go. Here's where you'll find Charlie Chaplin, The Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, and Popeye.
AngryAlien - Just because none of these sites are likely to have the latest box office blockbuster available, that doesn't mean you can't still watch Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, or Star Wars. In less than 30 seconds. Acted out by bunnies.
PublicDomainTorrents - Head here for B-movies "Like Attack of the Giant Leeches", "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter" (wonder what that love child looks like?), and "Track of the Moon Beast". On the other hand, you'll also find "Night of the Living Dead" on this site -- so it's not all bad.
AtomFilms - There are some very creative films on this site made up of mostly user-created content. AtomFilms is a service of MTV Networks that serves up content to mobile phones and Web sites, but since they're partnered with Comedy Central and Spike TV there are a few gems on here if you poke around a bit.
Here's a novel way to get people to buy or rent movies from your website. Let them send clips from popular films as custom video greeting cards.
blinkBox is an online video site with a small selection of popular movies and TV shows available for download. But the site's most interesting feature is the ability to take clips from selected videos, add a message to the beginning, and share the clip with your friends.
You're supposed to be able to embed the clips on your blog or web page as well, but we couldn't get that to work. (Neither could NewTeeVee or TechCrunch). So you'll have to check out our special message to you (and John Malkovich) at blinkBox's site.
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We all have a ton of DVDs laying around, and have no way to really keep track of them all digitally. Sure, there are services out there who have come and gone that promised to store your precious information once you've taken days and days to enter them.
You've just laid out the scratch for a new 42" HDTV, 
