Anyway, the with a few hours of Vongo experience under my belt I can say that the browsing experience is favorable. The usage restrictions, while bewildering, do not often seriously thwart enjoyment. The catalog, though, is pathetic and ragtag, and this last fact poisons the service and any chance of a recommendation...The catalog is all over the map. Starz licenses rights to movies from all periods, so the New This Week section presents titles of recent and musty vintage. Concert videos add value; Blues Traveler and Brian Wilson showed up during my testing. TV shows are not out of bounds; I see an old Charlie's Angels episode.
A selection of review points:
- Movie information for each title includes cast members linked to other movies in which they appear. This attractive feature lets you set up film festivals around certain actors or directors.
- Movies can be sorted by expiration date, a handy feature under the circumstances. You can keep an eye out for movies that will soon be unavailable and grab them before they disappear.
- Scheduled downloading is an option; you select a start time from a list of five start times; it's unclear why the program doesn't support a completely user-specified system. The Windows system tray pops open a notification when downloading starts.
- It's possible to queue up to 10 movies for download, but only one movie downloads at a time. You can watch a movie while it is downloading, if your connection speed is fast enough to stay ahead of the playback. However, transport controls (fast-forward, rewind, and the progress bar) do not work on any viewing that started while the download was in progress.
- Full-screen playback did not work on the second screen of a two-screen desktop during my testing. The playback window cannot be resized, and there is no right-click functionality on the screen. So you have a choice of only two playback formats.
- During about three hours of use, Vongo mistakenly determined that I was offline, and discontinued a download. The program has no menus or right-click functions, and there was no apparent way of reconnecting the program. Closing the client and reopening it did the trick.
Vongo is fun to use. Linking around from actor to director to actor could be a fabulous movie discovery mechanism--like IMDB with actual content. The problem with Vongo is that the content is drastically poor. A decent service model is wasted on a fourth-rate catalog. Then--those baffling usage restrictions. There is not an average movie-lover on this planet who can understand why "Vanya on 42nd Street," an art-house film made in 1994, should "expire" at the end of this month as if it were a hot property. While it might not be the fault of Starz, which licenses what it can get under terms of the business environment, it is bullshit like this that skewers these services and will continue to skewer them until the movie industry as a whole emerges from its denial and recognizes that we live in an on-demand world. Give me Bit Torrent or give me an authorized service that works.
In the meantime, Vonga cannot be recommended. I will not continue my subscription into the second month.
