MovieBeam Video-on-Demand

MOVIEBEAM VIDEO-ON-DEMAND SERVICE REVIEW: A Video Store in Your Living Room

July 2007 By —Grant Clauser

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The movies look and sound pretty good. The standard definition movies are in widescreen mode, and look good, though not quite as good as DVDs. The HDTV movies also look good, but due to the MPEG4 compression, you may notice more artifacts than other HDTV sources. The high definition movies are in Dolby Digital surround sound, but only some of the standard definition movies are, though that will change over the next few months.

If you like recent movies, the selection is great. MovieBeam has distribution agreements with all the major studios except Sony. When I was using it (throughout the month of April) Walk The Line, The Chronicles of Narnia, Saw 2 and Good Night and Good Luck were among the offerings. It pretty much mirrors a new release wall of a video rental store, so unless your taste is very eclectic, you’ll find plenty to watch. While I’d like to see the price of the box and the rentals knocked down a bit to make up for the picture quality tradeoffs, it’s a good option for people who watch a lot of movies. yy