Vongo
My Vongo Review: (updated 51/2/2006)
Edit: I have decided this will be my last month with Vongo. Their movie selection did not get better. It is an interesting idea, but much like the others in the market, the limited selection renders it useless after a month or two. I haven't used it in 2 months, and basically forgot about it. No reason to keep paying for something I wont use. Maybe when they are able to expand their library.
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At long last a Internet based movie/TV service that may actually get it! Starz has created Vongo. A movie download and real time streaming service. All for $9.99 a month. Thats right, for $9.99 a month you can download as many movies as you like to your notebook, PC, or other portable device. You can also just watch the Starz channel in real time. If you have the tech on your computer you can output that to a TV or other display screen, as appropriate.
In the past I have used Movielink to download movies. Usually around 4-5 $ a pop. Not a bad deal, but I don't find their movie selection that fantastic. The other big difference is that it is per movie, and not a flat fee. It did integrate with Windows Media Center though, so I could do the whole thing with my remote control.
If all goes well I am going to drop my digital comcast, go back to basic cable, and do vongo for my movies.
My top concerns:
- It is a separate application. What holes am I opening up in my machine? What information are they tracking? Etc. - There is an option in the account settings to use it anonymously. Apparently they do track your use to recommend items, etc. But at least you can have them not track everything. BTW, by default anonymous is turned off. It still isn't entirely clear to me what is being tracked.
- How is the display. Is it High Dev? Is the streaming of the movie channel choppy or does it buffer a lot first? - The display is pretty good. Not HD from what I can tell, but looks just fine on my 21" LCD monitor full screen. There is some buffering when watching the live TV portion and no pause, etc.
- Is there a good enough selection to really warrant the $10 a month? The selection is ok. they have many crappy movies, and a few good ones. I am still able to find movies to watch, but I can't say at the moment I am excited about the selection. The good news is that the selection seems to be growing. maybe a half dozen movies a week, perhaps more are added. Then again, do I really want to watch 'The Caren Carpenter Story'?
- Can it be integrated with Windows Media Center? - Not at this time. I talked to a tech support person last night and he thought the technicians were working on that. Your media center remote will not work, nor will your play/pause buttons on your keyboard (if you have them).
Further thoughts:
- There are no ads, except the Starz intro before the movie.
- One account can be used on up to 3 machines. And you can change which machines once a month. So if you have two media center pc's and a notebook, $9.99 is still all you need to pay. You can't move a movie you downloaded on one machine to another over the network it seems. Though you can move to a portable device. I don't have any portable things, so I couldn't test that.
- They have plans for 800 movies, and 200 PPV movie options at any given time with 35 new movies rotating each week. I didn't see rhyme or reason for why some were PPV and some were not.
- Their full-screen mode doesn't allow you to pause from what I can tell. You have to click escape on your keyboard, then the pause button. That needs to be fixed right away.
- Speed varries for downloads. Last night it was peaked at 90k, at lunch I downloaded Elf in about 15 minutes. At about 670k/s. I was able to start watching the movie in just a couple minutes of starting the download. In fact, I was watching live Starz tv, a trailer for Treasure Hunter, and downloading elf at the same time. No stuttering. Though the download slowed down to about 300k for that period.
- Only big error I had was signing up. It didn't like my credit card. Probably bad billing address, but the error didn't give me anything specific. I was able to get by though. Otherwise a few search quirkiness, but all important functionality worked well.
- Clicking on a movie title brings up a quick trailer and details about the movie to the left side. Looks like a flash interface. The trailer starts playing almost instantly and rarely stutters. Below the trailer is a list of the main actors/actresses and directors, etc. Click on one of their names and up comes all the movies available that have the same person.
- They carry rated R, and NR. No adult titles. They also have parental controls so someone can't watch or download the R title without a code (should you enable it in the settings).
- While they have a number of new and old movies it isn't as good a selection as going to blockbuster. This is no different than movielink or the other online systems. I am sure it is part of the agreement worked out with the movie industry, etc. Lets hope that changes once the concept is 'proven' and more people are doing this sort of thing.
- I like their interface. I wish they had more filtering and searching control. I think their search is a bit broken at the moment. It would be great to search on 'Oscars' and get all movies that won something, or search for 5 stars, and get only top rated movies, etc. Their advanced search offered a bit more filtering options, but some didn't make sense. For example you can filter by rating. But one option was NC-17. They don't have any NC-17 movies in the system. At least not now. I tried doing a search on just NC-17, and it came up with a half dozen movies that ranged from G to R. Not sure why.
Overall I would recommend giving it a try. $9.99 makes it worth it for at least a month. On each of my machines at the house have a half dozen movies downloaded, ready to watch when I am ready.
It isn't useful if you don't want to watch TV on your computer. There are ways to direct to TV from PC, but if your not up to figuring it out and don't want to use the computer monitor, maybe it isn't for you.
If you have a notebook and can bring it to bed to watch TV, that would work. I happen to have my media center set up to watch TV from the PC (a few PCs actually) so it works well. My big wish is that they expand their library, offer more than one live channel and integrate into Windows Media Center so I can use my remote. And that other companies follow suit. Lets have some real competition and a significant improvement over our existing cable/statalite tv options.
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http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/01/03/vongomac/i...
How useless is that?
Which brings me to my next post (soon) about the rumored Google PC to be announced on Friday. A pc? non windows? hmmm could be interesting.
So far there is no one solution. We have to resort to having cable, using netflicks, movielink and itunes or various other options. All of which provide us incompatible formats, confusing interfaces and/or very little for the price paid. We typically walk away with a temporary need somewhat fulfilled but have nothing to show for it after the fact. Someday somehow we will have the ability to view and listen to what we want, when we want where we want. But we are not there yet. Not even close.
My favorite tv tool is still Media Center. I know there are other similar technologies out there for those that don't have it on their PC or want to have other non-MS software. Just set your DVR to record your favorite stuff. Then watch it at your leasure and fast forward through the commercials. Not perfect, but at least it is something... and it costs nothing.