Poor on paper, better on screen
On paper, the resolution of the downloaded footage is poor. Okay, in reality it's poor, too, and it even makes standard definition PAL 720x576 TV appear generous. The result is that videos do play back at a small size on a decent-resolution monitor of 17in or larger.
I was viewing on a 19in LCD monitor that runs at 1280x1024, and the video was so small that I had to sit up close to the screen to focus on the area within Windows Media Player 10 in which the footage is displayed. Not incidentally, WMP 10 is, it seems, the only program that has been assigned rights to play Sky's downloads.
I did a quick bit of maths and came up with figures showing that there are 5.6x more pixels on my monitor than there are on the Sky movies, so you can appreciate that the image really is very small. Rather to my surprise, though, and despite the 540 x 432 resolution of the videos, when movies were played back full-screen on my 19in monitor, they were actually quite watchable - without having to sit close up to the screen.
Interestingly, at Intel's big Viiv event in London last week, there were a number of large plasma screens being used to display Sky by broadband footage and, although these gave pictures that were quite soft, it would have been hard for anyone to say that they weren't watchable.
The video Codec is important because, unlike the latest and greatest low-data-rate Codecs used for high-def footage, such as MPEG-4/AVC and the rest, WMV3 doesn't require a lot of grunt from the PC or graphics card.
Yes, we all might like higher res - even high-def - downloads - but they can be unplayable on many PCs and are also likely to involve larger file sizes than lower-res versions created using older Codecs, and that would make download times longer.
I can understand why Sky's made the decisions it's made but I'd thought that the low resolution of its movies might be a fatal flaw in the game plan. Watching the movies playing full screen has made me come to doubt my initial conclusion. But, I'm still looking forward to the time when Sky does offer higher-res downloads - though I suspect that part of the reason why the company has managed to get movie studios sufficiently on side is because it's not offering movies at even standard PAL resolution - so piracy, even if (or should I say, "when"?) the copy-protection system gets cracked will be seen as less of an issue.
What I can't figure out, though, is how I'd ever find time to watch any of them within the 30-day window that you're allowed after downloading!
When I first started looking at what I could download, I'd imagined that the period available for watching was the same as the period during which the files are available for download - and it's not; as our original news story made clear; most movies will be watchable for 30days and (the story says) most sports clips for just seven days.
I haven't done a proper check but I've noticed that some movies are available for nearly 300 days whereas others are available for nearer to 150 days. All the the movies I've looked at so far are only watchable for 30 days after the download. Until I've checked a bunch more I don't know if some have longer or shorter "shelf-lives".
