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Streaming Video: The Horror!
Surely when it comes to watching movies there's nothing more diabolically unpleasant than watching a movie streamed via the Internet.
One of the "bonus" features of this otherwise spectacular release is the opportunity to watch the original 1941 The Wolf Man via BD-Live, online on a PC or Mac, or even on a smartphone, such as a BlackBerry or iPhone.
Given it's only 70 minutes, black-and-white, and relatively low-res, it wouldn't seem to be much of a resource hog. Alas, not much has changed in the couple years since watching a simple Tropic Thunder featurette via BD-Live proved to be an exercise in patience building. Even this past April's BD-Live Sherlock Holmes chat with Robert Downey Jr. proved unable to provide a constant audio stream.
Trying to watch The Wolf Man as a streaming video was painful. Actually, it was worse. It was impossible to watch the entire movie via BD-Live.
Day One: The first attempts barely made it past the Universal Studios opening logo. Then... a pause... and then a screen appeared with the following message:
"We hope you enjoyed watching the original Wolf Man movie. To purchase the film to go to www.UniversalHiDef.com/buywolfman.
Help us make this an even better experience by answering a few questions at www.UniversalHiDef.com/wolfmansurvey.
Options: Back or Play Again"
As for the survey, it's a cheap piece-of-junk Survey Monkey survey with only six multiple choice questions (including things like age and sex). There's no opportunity to expound on the incredibly poor experience of trying to stream via BD-Live. So good luck making this "experience" better, fellas. The survey comes across as an incredibly insincere attempt at receiving audience feedback.
Each time the movie stopped to buffer, it kicked back to the "thanks for watching" screen.
Day Two: Still had problems, but the Blu-ray startup included a "fresh preview" and the movie played for almost 10 minutes at one time (making it all the way to the canes scene in the Conliffes' antiques store). Then it went back to the "thanks for watching" page.
Lon Chaney Jr. in a tasty role
Photo: Universal Pictures
Next, I downloaded the latest firmware upgrade. The first attempt after the update didn't even make it through the full color Universal logo, the one before the classic black-and-white logo. Then the movie paused every minute or so, the presentation not nearly as smooth as before, then it still went to the "thanks for watching" screen before it even got as far as it had the night before.
Day Three: The stream choked at the Claude Rains casting card. Then there was a DNS error while attempting to confirm the firmware. After a reboot, it made it to the doctor's visit after Larry gets bitten... then the "thanks for watching" page yet again.
Going online, it turns out anybody visiting UniversalHiDef.com can watch the movie on the Internet simply by registering or by entering the digital copy code from the Blu-ray insert. Finally, this option did make it all the way through the movie. Not flawless, but not as unacceptably bad as the BD-Live route.
Even so, there are too many platform issues with the Web. On a Mac, using Safari, the movie was virtually unwatchable as it attempted to buffer after every couple seconds. The ultimate solution was to go back to Windows and watch it on Internet Explorer.
So, as it stands, streaming video of any lengthy content is still sketchy via the Web. And via BD-Live, well, fahgeddaboudit.
Is this some kind of experiment at the behest of Comcast, who's supposed to be buying NBC/Universal from GE? BD-Live sucks, guys. It sucks bad. It sucks even more than a crap vampire movie. Couple BD-Live's increasingly disappointing technology with the poor bandwidth of the Internet in America, a large part of it under fairly slow "high speed" connections supplied by Comcast's broadband service, and it's clear there's still work to be done in providing speedy mass data transfer to houses from coast to coast.
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