Video download service CinemaNow comes to Canada in August (aka Cineplex)

[hugh]

CinemaNow, an internet video download service owned by Best Buy, has announced it will begin offering service in Canada sometime in August.

The service which gives movies lovers the ability to rent or buy standard and high definition movies over the web will compete with similar services from Sony and Apple.

At launch time, the service will only be available on computers. Best Buy says it expects to have the service available on other devices in the fall. In the U.S., the service is now available on a number of LG and Samsung HDTV`s and a number of Blu-ray players from Panasonic, LG' Samsung and Insignia.

The company did not announced movie pricing, however, its expected that prices will be pretty much in line with the prices charged by Apple and Sony.

Contrary to what has been reported by a number of media outlets, CinemaNow is not a Netflix type service. Under the Netflix service, users can stream an unlimited amount of television shows and movies to their HDTV or Netflix enabled device for $8 a month. The CinemaNow service is an online video store that enables consumers to rent a movie for 48 hours or buy it outright.

[timlocke]

Good. My freshly bought Insignia cheapo BD player claims that it can support CinemaNow in the USA so one hopes there will be a flash update sometime before Xmas to enable it in Canada.
From the description of the service the BDUs won't have any excuse to bother the CRTC.

[MarcP]

SOCAN will be quick to have them in their crosshair just like they're doing for Netflix and AppleTV.

[oberst]

CinemaNow is powered by the RoxioNow infrastructure, which is also behind a few other branded services in the US. Cineplex has a Roxio service here in Canada as well, although it is PC-based only. I'd guess the initial Best Buy up here will be similar, until the consumer-electronic options show up. Unless there's a big Roxio upgrade in the works, the PC stuff is likely to be Windows-only (it uses Windows DRM), so Macs need not apply...

It's interesting they say they'll have 10,000 titles available (and they only have 2 studios locked in so far). The Cineplex site has only a fraction of this, so either there's something odd about that number, or there's a big whack of new Canadian-licensed content on the way. Anyone know roughly how many titles are available through iTunes Canada?

[Lindsay649]

CinemaNow is also avalable on new Sharp Acquos television sets.

[hugh]

Lindsay, in Canada?

[proudcanadian]

www.canada.cinemanow.com
www.youtube.com/movies

[hugh]

A lousy selection of rentals on CinemaNow.

On the recommended list they have Date Night and Fantastic Mr. Fox. Really???

[hugh]

Went to the Customer support page



Guess I won't be shopping at CinemaNow!

[j0dest3r]

I love this in the FAQ.

Q: How do I watch these videos on my TV?

A: If your laptop has an S-video jack, then you can hook your computer directly to your TV. For more information and other suggestions on how to watch on your TV, click here.

LMAO~!

[Lindsay649]

Do not like the idea of providing your credit card during the registration process in order to get on their mailing list. Still getting error for the customer support page. The app on my Sharp television set will still not access the site and still says service not available outside the United States. Not really interested but enjoy the concept.

[VanceVains]

If you are looking to buy a new Panasonic TV, spend a good part of the day wiring a LAN line through your house to neatly hook up to that TV, and expect to select CinemaNow on that TV and watch a movie ... don't bother!!

I activated my CinemaNow account and went through all the steps. Starting watching 30 minutes of a movie and it completely froze up. Could fast-forward through the movie but could not play it. Yes, internet is working at 10 mbps ... firmware updated ... all the basics are covered off.

I called CinemaNow to report the issue and they told me that CinemaNow is supported by Samsung only - not Panasonic (amazing since there is a CinemaNow icon on the menu of the Panasonic TV!). They said you should not have been able to access the CinemaNow feature at all.

What's even more perplexing is that I called Panasonic Canada to report what CinemaNow told me and the Panasonic representative said "absolutely ... CinemaNow IS supported by Panasonic in Canada ... there is no way it should not work ... CinemaNow has got their information wrong". They gave me the support number for CinemaNow is Canada. I called it, and was routed to the same CinemaNow office I originally called in Sault Lake City, USA.

They again tell me that it should not work on a Panasonic. The representative and I navigated through the internet to a Best Buy site that states that CinemaNow is available on Panasonics. This was news to him.

A long story short ... I spent countless hours investigating this and the result is still the same; I cannot get movies to play on my brand new Panasonic television.

I am sparing some choice vocabulary for how angry I am about this!! I cannot believe that a customer should endure this nonsense when buying a product. It's like buying a car and you need to be a mechanic to get it running so you can drive it off the lot.

Shame on Panasonic ... shame on CinemaNow. I would highly recommend you do NOT purchase these products.

[Jake]

Help us out. Give us your TV model and location in case someone else can confirm your findings.

[Eldar3333]

Shame on Panasonic ... shame on CinemaNow. I would highly recommend you do NOT purchase these products.

Hi Vance--I certainly sympathize with your trials with CinemaNow "customer service". You can read through this thread about my problems with them--never have had such an experience with customer service with *any* company.

Anyways, after a horrible chat experience and over a month of having an email ticket open with them, they've finally decided to give me a coupon for a single movie rental. Over the course of the last month, they have not once acknowledged that they had given me conflicting and very obviously wrong information, or responding to my complaints about how I was treated, aside from this one comment:

Fair enough. We have made it quite laborious and for that I do apologize

--understatement to the extreme. Someone from CinemaNow support dropped in these forums not too long ago--I PMed them, but haven't heard anything back--understandable given the holidays, but at the same time I'm not holding my breath either.

As far as the actual service, we've used it once in November--we have a Panasonic TC-L42E30 TV with their EASYIP TV, a wireless N repeater behind our TV with wired connections to both our TV and a Panasonic BD210 blu-ray player with Viera Connect. I expected to see CinemaNow on Viera Connect, but it's only on the TV at the moment. In November we rented "Unstoppable", paying the extra dollar for HD--didn't seem to actually be in HD--we had a message at the beginning that our connection wasn't good enough for HD, but we were charged for HD anyways. We restarted the stream and the connection quality was improved according to their indicator, but the video quality was more like DVD than HD. We stream Netflix regularly through our blu-ray player and get very good HD quality with only rare connection issues (brief black screen flash--very short lived and really rare).

So, I wouldn't blacklist Panasonic because of your CinemaNow experience--it seems to me that CinemaNow was made available before it was really ready.

[daddyg]

I recently received a $50 Cinemanow gift card for buying a TV at BB.

I have activated an account at Cinemanow online and loaded the card onto my account and I would like to be able to use it on my SmartTV (Cinemannow is one of the Apps), however it seems that they want me to enter in credit card info to activate my devices to stream to.

Does anyone who has used this service know if you are required to enter CC info? Is there a way around this? I like to limit the amount of online vendors I give my CC info (for security reasons) to and since I am using a gift card to watch movies, I don't see the need to enter it.

Any ideas?