Finding movies online, legally
Toby Wilkins had emailed me about this weeks ago, but I just now got a chance to check it out.
SpeedCine indexes movies available through iTunes, Crackle, Hulu and Amazon VOD, letting you know where you can find any given title. For example, searching for the The Nines provides links for download through Amazon, iTunes and NetFlix.
Because most of these services are U.S.-only, it’s not much help to international users, unfortunately.
The site is still in beta, and while it’s really useful, I wish it provided better URLs for copy-and-pasting. Right now, SpeedCine gives you a jumble of letters after an ASP query. Here’s the listing for Go in SpeedCine:
http://www.speedcine.com/results.aspx?query=T0001274
and here it is on Crackle:
http://crackle.com/c/GO
That’s small enough to be easily Twittered, and feels permanent enough that I’d be comfortable putting it in a blog post.
But that’s a small quibble. SpeedCine is worth making your first stop when trying to find a movie online.
Articles
September 25th, 2009 at 10:16 am
The picture isn’t perfect, but having netflix stream directly over the internet through my Xbox is pretty awesome. The range of movies also isn’t huge, but there are tons of tv shows and documentaries that more than make up for the limited library.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Netflix on Xbox does have a nice interface, and is exceedingly convenient, but the picture quality still really detracts from the experience. The black levels and framerate are maddeningly inconsistent.
It’s interesting, and more than a little disappointing, that the pirates (the scene groups at least) seem more concerned with high quality releases than the studios. Just about every film released on bluray is available online, in quality nearly indistinguishable from the original, several weeks before being sold in stores. With quality control so stringent that these days you see a release “nuked” for even minor violations of scene standards, like using a slightly older encoder, or failing to ensure compatibility with some older settop boxes.
Meanwhile, the legitimate options for watching films online or by download look little better than youtube videos
September 25th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
SpeedCine is particularly cool for finding stuff. Definitely bookmarked.
My favorite rental place, GreenCine (who had far more Indie and Foreign offerings than Netflix when I chose them), also offers online movies — but hasn’t really fully embraced the idea yet (a vast percentage of their catalog is still disc-only). Still, if you like supporting the little(r) guy, give them a try.
I agree with Chris’ lamentation about quality control, though. In fact, there are some scene downloads that look better than the DVD releases, never mind the online offerings. But the general public doesn’t seem to care all that much, so I’m not sure the studios will ever do much to rectify this. My employer cares, but mainly because there are sufficiently powerful creative and tech folks here who care enough to inspire the big bosses to let the effort be spent. Most other releases are hit or miss, and will continue to be because the general public is indifferent to quality once a pretty low minimum standard is reached (that standard being SD TV). Hopefully the demise of VHS and analog TV will cause the bar to start getting raised, but it’ll take a fairly long time for even a so-so HD quality to truly become the low bar (and even then, only if stuff like iPod viewing doesn’t keep the bar low).
September 25th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Regarding your quibble, human-readable URLs are more likely to get picked-up by a search engine. Digg relies on this, after all. SpeedCine’s method would give an SEO consultant a heart attack.
September 26th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
And if you want legal AND FREE, check out the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/moviesandfilms
Listing classic movies, serials, and such that are now in the Public Domain.
September 27th, 2009 at 1:03 am
For Brits, there’s also:
http://www.findanyfilm.com
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I just wanted you to know that I took your advice and changed my URLs so that the film’s titles are included. Hopefully, that will make them work better with search engines. So our URL for GO is now http://speedcine.com/t/T0001274/Go. I need the T0001274 code because unlike Crackle, I must be ready to combine URLs from a dozen or more sites for each film.
However, including the title won’t necessarily make my URLs smaller because many movies have very long titles, which I won’t be able to shorten. bit.ly anyone?
By the end of the year I will have the interface for international users plus at least 25,000 films (including the Internet Archive)
Thanks for the mention.
October 5th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Hey guys,
Just wanted to jump in and say thanks for mentioning Crackle. The more we support and improve these great search engines that help users find free, legal movies, the better off we will all be. Thanks, and we always welcome feedback!
Chad Community Manager, Crackle
October 8th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
I just actually watched the Nines on Netflix streaming. It’s such an amazing service that we have cancelled our cable. Now we pay $9 a month to get as many movies as we want! Awesome! The only downside is that you have to have a steady 4mbit connection to get HD. We have 6, so it is not a problem, but I know some people still have DSL and only have 1mbit. It would be nice if they gave a download option with netflix that would “corrupt” after a week, for those with slower connections.
-Josh