David Pogue The New York Times June 1, 2006
YOU know the trouble with movies in America these days? There just aren't enough ways to see them. If you miss a movie in the theater, it's gone forever -- unless you can find a video-rental store, DVD-by-mail service, cable movie station, pay-per-view service, video-on-demand channel, Internet movie download site, hotel room or airplane.
Thank goodness, then, that a company backed by Disney, Intel and Cisco has stepped in to fill the breach with yet another movie-delivery mechanism. It's a slim, silver, good-looking $200 set-top box called MovieBeam.
You connect the MovieBeam player directly to your TV set. Then, whenever you're in the mood for a movie, you choose from the list of
100 movies on the player's hard drive. Preposterous as this may sound, there's no monthly fee and no minimum; you're billed only for the movies you watch ($4 for a new release, $2 for an old one). You can rewind, pause, fast-forward and replay a movie you've bought -- for 24 hours from your first glimpse of the opening credits.Each week, seven or eight new movies magically show up in the player's list, pushing an equal number of old ones off to movie heaven.
This wireless movie-delivery feature gives MovieBeam its name. The company doesn't require an Internet connection or even a computer. Nor does the service depend on what cable or satellite setup you have, if any. How, then, can it send enormous, multigigabyte movies to MovieBeam owners nationwide?
Answer: Very cleverly. MovieBeam's movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the country. You're actually receiving MovieBeam's movies at this very moment -- but they're invisible unless you have the MovieBeam box. (MovieBeam pays PBS for these piggybacking rights.)