We’ve been using Vongo for the past month and I thought that I would give my 2 cents about what I think about it. We cancelled our satellite and have only the basic, basic, basic (did I say basic) service from Charter. Our total bill (taxes included) is around $18.00. But this gives us only the local channels that you’d normally be able to receive via antenna, plus Weather Channel and WE (Women’s Entertainment … how great). We tried an indoor antenna, but the quality was horrible. So that left us to the very basics of television with few movie choices. So we could rent from the Blockbuster 12 miles away, see what’s available for checking out at the library, or perhaps use the future medium … the Internet. Mind you, we don’t plan to suffer like this forever and plan to subscribe to a more populated-channel plan with either Charter or DirectTV one day. We took a break from Dish Networks (Echostar) and don’t plan to return to them since they don’t offer local Wilmington channels. But the saving have been great. $18.00/month compared to the $80.00/month with Dish for their 180 channels. True, the base price is $49.99 per month. But add in the DVR price, the extra receiver, extras and taxes. Also, if you purchase any PPV’s that just adds to it. We saw some bills for over $100.00 when we added in a few PPV’s as well. So now we have our basic, bare bones Charter cable, or Yahoo Radio Plus, for non-commercial music, and Vongo for movies.
First of all, what is Vongo? Vongo is an Internet movie subscription service offered by Starz. They offer 1000′s of movies for download that they show on the Starz Cable channels like Encore for $9.95/month. You can download however many movies you’d like to a maximum of 3 computers in your household. The movies aren’t the newest releases. But there’s a large variety available, offering a lot of great movies. You really need a broadband internet connection to use this (cable modem/DSL)
I found that on the notebook I download them to, that the movies sometimes aren’t as fluid as I’d like. Often this seems to be mostly in the beginning, but it seems to improve during the movie. I’m not sure it it’s because my eyes are somehow adjusting or if it’s actually improving. I’m not talking about streamed movies either, I’m talking about movies I’ve completely downloaded. But this imperfection isn’t a showstopper for me and the family hasn’t seemed to notice this much. My goal is to eventually get a computer running Media PC Center with much higher speeds. Also, the Vongo is still in Beta (not the final release) so perhaps this will improve.
There are also other notable sites that do offer newer releases. For example, we downloaded the Fantastic 4 over the weekend from Movielink. The video quality and fluidity in which the video displays is superior over Vongo’s videos. But the videos for new releases average between $3.95 to $4.95 each. The viewing time is 24 hours, using Digital Rights Management. So if you’d like to have a cache of 1000′s of videos for only $9.95/month then Vongo still rules. Another alternative I’ve found to Movielink is CinemaNow. Although CinemaNow’s prices can sometimes be a tad less expensive than Movielink’s, there system isn’t as reliable. There were times where the movies wouldn’t download completely. I was trying to dowload “Clifford, the Big Red Dog” for my daughter. It never completed the download. I ended up paying double, because out of frustration I went to movielink to download it instead. I could of complained and tried to get Cinemanow to reimburse, but the time and frustration didn’t seem worth it. Sometimes there movies will download but they won’t provide an accurate status as to the percentage of dowload. So if you’re looking for reliability, Movielink is still better. Again, for an expansive library of choices at a cheap price, Vongo rules at the moment.
Here’s a link to an even more vast review of Vongo .
- Tim
I took a break on posting to my blog last week. But now I’m back.
