Starz/Real Media Movie Service (Continued)

I downloaded two movies to my laptop using the Starz/Real internet movie service. I got on the flight to London and once it was OK to take out the laptop, I booted up and launched the new version of the Real player that I downloaded as part of this service.

In my library, there were the two movies I had downloaded; 8 Mile and Taxi Driver. I chose 8 Mile and was able to watch it in full screen mode. I could rewind, fast forward, pause, put the computer to sleep and wake it up with the movie ready to keep playing.

The quality of the video was fine although there was the occasional compression artifact. The audio was even better than the video. It was a perfectly fine experience in all respects.

I kept Taxi Driver for the flight back. The only problem is somehow my laptop’s clock got messed up in London and got set to the year 2036. That caused my Real player to delete both files as they were past their allotted time period. For some reason, one movie had a longer life than the other, but both were wacked with the date change.

I like the fact that the files get automatically erased so they don’t continue to take up disk space. The date change thing has never happened to me before so I don’t think that’s something to worry about.

All in all, I like the service. I don’t watch movies on my laptop except when I fly. So I see this service as only useful to me when I am traveling a lot. But I think I’ll keep it for a while to see how much I use it. At $12.95/month, its probably too expensive unless I am doing at least 2 cross country trips a month.