King Kong
www.lovefilm.com
Size: 1.90Gb.
Cost: £19.99
Broadband speed: 2.2Mbps
Download time: 2hr 58min
Finally, a (legal) movie download worth crowing about. The decision to launch the UK’s first “download-to-own” service with a monumental megablockbuster such as King Kong is nothing less than a blatant commercial acknowledgement of the impending revolution in film consumption. From now on, it says, everything changes. No more packaging and purchasing, no more discs, no more queues, no more stores, and perhaps even, no more cinemas — just the delicious information age immediacy of you, your hard drive, and your instant movie.
That’s the theory anyway. In practice, the King Kong download is an impressive, if sputtering, start. First, at £19.99 it’s slightly overpriced (the retail DVD, with bonus disc, is available from as little £12.99 in high-street stores). For your money you get a single no-frills DVD through the post, plus two instant file downloads: one to be played exclusively on your PC, the other on your “portable device” (video-iPods, strangely, are not allowed here).
The downloading process itself is fantastically easy — two clicks and a credit card number and you’re away. But the initial jubilation at being part of a cyberspace movie experience quickly dissipates as big boy Kong pummels his way into the PC hard drive over three whoppingly long hours, after which time the PC has gone all wobbly, can barely muster up the strength to produce a single document and needs the equivalent of a post-coital snooze to get back on track.
The speed, or not, of downloading is obviously the Achilles’ heel of the process. There’s something very quaint about it. Something very dial-up, very pre-dial-up even, something very Commodore 64 and cruddy cartridge game about it. And yet, as with all baby-stepping technology, the genuine thrill here is in tasting the very real entertainment future it so clearly presages. Everyone from George Lucas to Bill Gates agrees, once broadband speeds hit optimum capacity this is how we will watch most of our movies.
And looking, eventually, at the downloaded King Kong, it’s hard to disagree. Technically, it’s top notch. The picture clarity is rich and sharp, the sound thunderous and only occasionally, just around the T-Rex attack, do the human faces look a bit rough and pixellated.
Of course, it’s a testament to the power of the movie itself that it plays beautifully on a small laptop screen in the midst of a busy office (commuters are surely in for a treat). And yet, the unspoken danger with a crowd-pleasing film like this, one that is defined by scream-out-loud insect attacks and giddy breakneck chases, is that ironically it illustrates what the entire download debate ultimately denies — the value of audience, and the fundamental community of experience so inherent to the mechanics of successful cinema.
‘Putting short films on a website works nicely’
by Martin Stevens
Cheese Makes You Dream
www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork
Cost: free
Broadband speed: 512Kbps
Download time: N/A (streaming)
Film Network, “an interactive showcase for new British film-makers”, provides streaming downloads of short films. My connection couldn’t cope with the high-quality version of the film I chose, Kara Miller’s Cheese Makes You Dream, so it played like a slideshow — the pictures looked nice, but didn’t move. Low quality played in a tiny window and was watchable but a bit grotty.
Putting short films on a website works nicely. There’s no download time, and you can jump from one film to another. And because there are no adverts, you can quietly explore the site without feeling that you’re being shouted at.
‘I’m not convinced it was worth the bother’
by Hugo Rifkind
Various shorts
www.atomfilms.com
Cost: free
Broadband speed: 1 Mbps
Download time: 20min for each short
Atom films is a nice idea. It’s a free download site with indie leanings. This means that the majority of the stuff is made by amateurs. Obviously, it’s great for budding film-makers to have an arena like this. Unfortunately, their work is often a bit rubbish.
The films offered for download (as opposed to the ones you can just watch on the site) are all generally rather slick. I watched Between You and Me, a rather odd crime caper, and Consent, a witty sketch based on the idea of college kids encountering a detailed and excruciating legal agreement before having sex. They were a very enjoyable four-and-a-half and six minutes respectively, but with each one taking between 20 and 30 minutes to download on to my laptop (and this is with a fast connection), I’m not convinced it was worth the bother.
‘Classic cinema here is strictly B-movies’
by Wendy Ide
Attack of the Giant Leeches
www.CinemaNow.com
Size: 327558.4 KB
Cost: Free trial
Broadband: 150 Kbs
Download time: 50min
Your money buys you 24 hours in which to watch a movie, after which something mysterious happens and it self- destructs. Alternatively, you can purchase the film (costing between $9.95 and $19.95). However, because I opt for the free seven-day trial Platinum membership, I can make my selection only from the truly abysmal choice of free content.
Recommendations on the first page I access include The Wizard Of Gore and She Freaks. Tempted as I am by The Cattle Mutilation Cowgirl, I head to a section where I assume that I’ll find something to watch. But no, it seems that classic cinema here is strictly B-movies. I pick Attack of the Giant Leeches. It’s relatively easy to download. There’s one slight hold-up when I’m asked where I want to save the film.
Someone helps me. Then it’s all plain sailing. Except with my 1959 creature feature safely stored, I start to wonder what more populist films are available. I spend nearly an hour trying to find the “rent or buy” option but it eludes me.
‘Clicking the mouse feels like throwing a stone down a well’
by Nigel Kendall
Two short films: High Windows; Lonely Drinks
www.ukscreen.net
Size: Streaming
Cost: Free
Broadband speed: 1Mbps
This amateurish-looking site is designed to act as a shop window for the next generation of UK film-makers. In four main categories — Film, Documentary, Animation and Music Video — it provides links to streaming videos made by its members.
The standard is high, even if the same directors' names have a habit of cropping up. Brian Barnes is one of these names. His High Windows (1998), the accompanying blurb tells us, ran as a supporting film on the London first run of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It's a down and dirty tale of drug addiction, theft and betrayal.
The important thing, though, is that you can watch it over the internet. Granted, the 3in window is not the Odeon. But it's not oblivion, either, and that's where most of these films would have been heading ten years ago.
I enjoyed Husam Asi’s short Lonely Drinks, but on his longer film, an Islamic comedy called Pleasure Marriage, the link kept freezing. This is a frustratingly common problem with ukscreen. Often, clicking the mouse feels like throwing a stone down a bottomless well. You know you should get a result; but how long are you prepared to wait?
THE FUTURE: SECURITY IS THE KEY
by Boudicca Fox-Leonard
“Crackers” are constantly trying to break the security systems protecting film downloads and DVDs. Blu-ray Discs and HD-DVD are considered to be more robust than existing systems and capable of evolving after any compromise.
