Digital Trends

CinemaNow may have scored a major coup with its new Burn To DVD service: subscribers can download movies via the Internet and burn them to standard DVDs.

Online movie distributor CinemaNow may have scored a major win in the battle to sell legal copies of Hollywood movies online: the company's just-announced Burn To DVD service enables customers to purchase and download movies via the Internet and burn them to standard DVD disks which can be used in portable players, everyday DVD players, laptops, computers, and other devices. And users don't just get the movie: they get the entire commercial DVD release, complete with any extras, commentaries, interviews, deleted scenes, and more.

Download-to-burn has been the holy grail of online movie distribution, but so far studios have been reluctant to let customers burn movies to standard DVDs for fear of inspiring movie piracy. CinemaNow has apparently convinced studios to play ball—Disney, MGM, Sony, Sony Pictures, LionsGate, and Universal are all on board—even if they don't yet have the stomach to offer recent film releases.

Burn To DVD is currently in beta, and works like this: subscribers can purchase movies at prices starting at $8.99; the films are then downloaded to the user's computer via the Internet. (Depending on connection speed, this will usually take a couple of hours—and will really impact those multiplayer shoot-em-up sessions, so time your downloads carefully). Then using CinemaNow's custom DVD Burner software, users can burn one (and only one!) copy of the movie to a standard DVD. CinemaNow says they will keep updating their software to keep up with any cracks, hacks, and clever pirates who try to break the system. CinemaNow says the burned DVDs work with about 94 percent of standard DVD gear: so the movies ought to work with your stuff. They just aren't promising.

Like CinemaNow's download-only offerings, Burn to DVD is Windows-only: you'll need Windows XP, Windows Media Player 10, and a DVD writer.