Is it us, or was there suddenly of a loosening of the apron strings when it comes to downloading movies? Now we see that Movielink and CinemaNow (both of which insist that you use Internet Explorer, yuck) are now serving up pay-to-own downloads from Sony and MGM. There are 75 titles in all going on sale today, and some of them are actually good movies such as Memoirs of a Geisha, Goodnight and Good Luck, and Walk the Line, while there are some old ringers in there, too, such as Hitch, Barbershop, and Taxi Driver.
The only catch is, we noticed that titles such as Walk the Line are selling for $26.99 at Movielink. That’s an absurd price, considering that you can buy that same movie on DVD for $14.96 at Amazon. Why is there a $12.03 premium for downloading? Even if that title were in HD, that would still be a rip. A little better was CinemaNow, which we noticed selling Memoirs of a Geisha for $19.95. Still, we can’t see paying five extra dollars for a 1.2GB download when you don’t get any of the box art, and there’s no physical media. It’s an inauspicious beginning, but at least it’s something.
More pay-to-own movie download services debut [Reg Hardware]
