Find Legal Online Movies With Speedcine
By Russ Fischer/Sept. 25, 2009 11:36 am EST
The interface is pretty bare-bones right now. There’s an alphabetical index of all films, and the searchable database. The site is in beta, and hopefully they’ll be rolling out additional features like a new additions tab and a deeper set of database tags so that from one result you can quickly search related films.
There’s a lot to learn from InstantWatcher, the site that exhaustively catalogs everything available to stream on Netflix that I use on almost a daily basis. Since films available online may only be licensed for streaming or rental for a specific time, SpeedCine would be more useful if it presented that information. (InstantWatcher does: go to any movie page and the amount of time it will be available for streaming on Netflix is clearly stated.)
The other limitation with SpeedCine is international options — much of what is available on sites like Hulu can’t be viewed outside the US for licensing reasons. SpeedCine knows this, and is working on building a parallel international database, but it isn’t up yet.
With those caveats, I like SpeedCine quite a bit. I wanted to revisit The Talented Mr Ripley the other day, and I could quickly tell that it wasn’t available on Netflix, but SpeedCine could have given me a one-stop pointer to other options. I’ll keep using this one, and hope they can push the beta forward and add more features in the coming months. Check it out; I expect some of you will find it really useful.
[via John August]
