Miramax joined fellow studios Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal Monday by launching its own video rental service on Facebook, making many titles available for online viewing for the first time.
The Miramax eXperience offers 20 rentable titles to U.S. consumers, and 10 to both the UK and Turkey (full lists below) in what PaidContent notes is the largest Facebook streaming movie venture to date. Rentals are to be made available to France and Germany in the near future.
In addition to rentals, the app also contains a soon-to-be-launched Casting Call game that lets users cast friends as characters in Miramax films. Participants can unlock bonus content as they play.
Rentals cost 30 Facebook credits, or $3, of which Facebook keeps a third. Rentals can be saved for 30 days, although users only have 48 hours to watch a video after they begin playing it.
The app did not perform well in initial tests. I was charged three times and was still unable to watch Adventureland in Firefox. And while Miramax says the app has also been formatted for watching movies in the browsers of Google TVs and iPads, I found the experience on the latter largely unworkable — the dropdown menu often didn’t respond, and when I clicked to play a preview clip of Adventureland, I was told the file could not be found.
We’ve reached out to Miramax to see if these issues are universal and if it will be issuing a fix.
UPDATE: A third-party spokesperson recommended that iPad users access the app via apps.miramax.com/ipad.html for now, as it is currently experiencing some redirection issues on the device.
In a blog post, Miramax CEO Mike Lang said that in addition to streaming rentals, the company’s ultimate goal is to give users the ability to buy and store films “in their own cloud-based digital locker,” which they could then access from a variety of devices.
Titles, U.S.
- Adventureland
- Chicago
- Clerks
- Cold Mountain
- From Dusk Till Dawn
- Extract
- Gangs of New York
- Gone Baby Gone
- Good Will Hunting
- Jackie Brown
- Kill Bill
- Kill Bill 2
- No Country for Old Men
- Pulp Fiction
- Shall We Dance (2004)
- Sin City
- Spy Kids
- Swingers
- The Switch
- Trainspotting
Titles, UK
- Chicago
- Cold Mountain
- From Dusk Till Dawn
- Good Will Hunting
- Jackie Brown
- Kill Bill
- Kill Bill 2
- Shall We Dance (2004)
- Sin City
- Spy Kids
Titles, Turkey
- Adventureland
- Chicago
- Clerks
- Cold Mountain
- From Dusk Till Dawn
- Gone Baby Gone
- Good Will Hunting
- Jackie Brown
- Spy Kids
- Swingers
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