Digital Trends

It’s been barely the blink of an eye since the idea of actually downloading video to your PC or phone seemed like something straight out of a science fiction film. But given the meteoric increase in overall broadband adoption, skyrocketing download speeds and the realization, courtesy of peer-to-peer networking services, that people really do want to download footage anywhere on the go, well… It’s obvious that the rise of video download services was all but inevitable.

At the moment, video download services currently stand where music download counterparts stood two or three years ago. Which is, essentially, to say they’re on the cusp of a big leap forward, yet still waiting for that extra something to make the market explode. That an inevitable boom in the sector will happen is certain though, with even unlikely providers like iTunes already putting their best foot forward to capture a sizable slice of the pie.

Mind you, it’s worth making a distinction here between services that stream video and those that actually let you download it to your desktop or mobile device. For example, YouTube is the most widely-accessed video site, but you can’t download footage from there (at least not legally): Featured content is streamed. With other, alternate services though, you can pay and download entire moves to keep or rent, and in some cases even copy to portable media. And somewhere in the middle, you also find services like BBC iPlayer (sadly unavailable to many readers), which lets you stream content that’s been aired on the BBC network during the last seven days, or download it to your computer, but even then you can only keep it for 30 days.

Our position: There’s undoubtedly a future for both video streaming and downloading outlets. But as with digital music, the bigger demand will be for the latter option, since people inherently have a desire to own their entertainment. Add to that the fact that not only iPods, but other portable media players also now feature video playback, and it’s all too easy to see the video download as the way of the future.

In addition, more and more actual video content is becoming available, not just in terms of new releases, but also a very healthy back catalogue from studios eager to take advantage of this new, lucrative market, having suffered from illegal P2P downloads for too long.

So who are the contestants? Turns out there are quite a few services with investigating. As far as the mainstream goes, top players include:

• iTunes
• Apple TV
• Amazon Unbox
• Vudu
• NetFlix
• Xbox 360
• Cinema Now
• Movielink
• Vongo

After going hands-on with all, here’s how the competition stacks up: