Starz Play Review - Good Value Video Download Service

I have been using the Starz Play video download service for a few years now, although it has its flaws as I have written about here when it was called Vongo, it's continued to evolve.  Now that it's a white label service offered by Starz affiliate partners such as Verizon (here)  for a low price of $5.99 a month, it's really a pretty good value if you need a download service versus a streaming one such as Hulu.

Starz Play involves the download of client software (a version of Windows Player 11) to the PC, but it's not incredibly intrusive, and the overall set up is straight forward.  Then you browse or search through 2,500+ video offerings, primarily movies, all of which are available from Starz Entertainment.   This is a subscription service with unlimited viewing rights, so you can download a series of videos to the hard drive, and then watch them when convenient, even if not connected to the Internet, so it's perfect for travel or if you don't have a reliable Internet connection.

Users can activate up to 3 PCs per account, and I use at least 2 of them, one filled with kids/family movies for our Tahoe house, and one with my own movies for my work laptop, plus there are a few portable devices you can transfer the videos to, but almost no one has  one of those devices.   The quality of the video is reasonably good, although the volume is occasionally too low for me.  The bigger issue I have with the overall performance is the length of time it often takes to download a movie, although it's true you can start watching it after just a few minutes since it's a progressive download, but there is no reason for it to take 1 hour to download a 2 hour movie on a good connection.  

On the content side, the selection of movies & videos shows the strengths and weaknesses of the Starz Entertainment library since the suppliers are limited to just a few movie studios plus assorted other suppliers, although I find there are generally 5+ that I want to watch each month.  Top current movies include No Country for Old Men, Enchanted, and Spider Man 3, plus a bunch of catalog hits like the Back to the Future films.  In addition, the first Starz original content, a TV series version of the award-winning movie Crash, is far more entertaining than I had expected and almost makes the service worthwhile by itself.  

For a flat fee of $5.99 a month, that's a good deal, especially compared to $3-4 per rental on the Blockbuster OnDemand service (reviewed here) or on Comcast VOD.  Hulu or Netflix Instant may offer a wider range of content, especially on the TV side, but both require fairly robut live Internet connections.   If you're looking for a convenient download service and if you're willing to be somewhat flexible about the exact content, then deinitely try out Starz Play.