so just how easy is it to find movie downloads?
August 30, 2006

So in honor of release day Tuesday, I decided to experiment yesterday and see which new releases I could find and download online and how easily I could find them. It’s late August, so no huge box office movies debuted this week, but there are a couple big TV DVDs out. I trolled around the Internets for downloads of new release movies Akeelah and the Bee (Lionsgate Entertainment) and TV season sets Arrested Development (Fox Home Entertainment) and Desperate Housewives (Buena Vista Home Entertainment.)

The Search Engines
Google wants to be the search engine for video across the Internets - so I gave them first try. I typed "Akeelah and the Bees" in on Google video. I get five (just 5!) results, one’s a trailer, one’s a Charlie Rose interview with one of the film’s stars, the others are video reviews. None are links to downloads of the movie.

So I decide to switch to AOL Video, which also wants to be a video search engine and in its search bar even says “search videos across the web.” I put in Akeelah. To start with, I have more search results, at least 8 pages worth - not sure if that’s good or bad yet. The first page is all clips or local TV reviews. Same with the second page. I notice at the top you can narrow the results down to just movies, so I do. 25 results - ALL Trailers! What the?? I realize Akeelah isn’t the biggest film released on DVD, but it’s one of the biggest this week, it had a Starbucks promotion behind it! And shouldn't these video search sites at least be able to search through known movie download sites CinemaNow and Movielink?

The Legal Download Sites
Because I know Lionsgate is a backer of CinemaNow and has a deal with them, I start there and type in Akeelah in search - it doesn’t come up. Finally I find it under the “buy Hollywood hits” tab. It won’t tell me the price since I only have a Mac. I can’t even search on Movielink because I don't have a PC.

Because I write about all this stuff regularly, I know that Lionsgate doesn’t have announced deals with anyone outside of CinemaNow, Movielink and Apple iTunes, but iTunes doesn’t sell movies, at least yet.

Next I checked out TV, which is found on more places online, so you’d think I’d have better luck.

Desperate is on iTunes. Well, Arrested, I quickly remember after a search on iTunes and CinemaNow, will only be on MSN through a deal made with Fox. And it's not up there yet. I search the MSN site to try to find details on when - I looked under TV, but they want my zip code and to know if I have cable or satellite to give me a listing. I check under video - It’s all music videos. I go back to the main MSN page to search. It does an Internet search giving me results of stories saying that MSN will stream free full-episodes of Arrested later this year.

The Peer-to-Peer sites
Out of curiosity, I go next to the peer-to-peer sites, where users can upload files, sometimes pirated ones, to see what's available. I try BitTorrent, which has made nice with Hollywood (even signing a download deal with Warner) on its promises to fight piracy. Eureka! Endless copies of various seasons of Arrested. Of course, the files are all 1 gig or larger and I’m too chicken to download for fear of running out of space on my hard drive or downloading a virus or the fact that they're pirated copies or I don’t know. But they’re there. And same with Akeelah and the Bee.

On to Guba, another peer-to-peer site that has made nice with Hollywood and signed download deals with Sony and Warner. No Akeelah here, at least that's easily findable.

But there are Arrested episodes posted by users. Guba allows me to stream it, download it, transfer it to my iPod or PSP or email it to friends. The video quality on the stream isn’t bad for the Internet. It’s almost equal to TiVo quality, except it’s on a much smaller screen.

Maybe this was an unusual week given the titles, but I have to say I was kind of surprised about how limited the download offerings were - at least the legal ones - given that it seems like movies are everywhere online with new download deals announced every week.

Posted by on August 30, 2006 | Comments (1)