Kill the Cable

I’ve been using the EpixHD service on a trial basis over the weekend and while promising, it’s not quite there yet. EpixHD is being sold as a hybrid premium cable channel and online service. It’s a bit like if HBO decided to offer HBO OnDemand directly over the Internet, but only to people who were already paying for HBO through their cable service. As of right now EpixHD is only available to Verizon FIOS customers.

Cable

As a premium cable channel, it’s both a premium cable channel in simultaneously pushed out in both SD and HD(1080i). Shows play on a preset schedule and you can’t randomly access any movie you want. With Verizon, if you have their HD DVR option you also get access to to EpixHD OnDemand which does let you choose from whatever movies they have available that month.

Given this structure (which is the same for all the other premium cable channels), it’s hard not to view the existence of the actual “channel” as anything but some some habitual relic that is still kicking around.

Online

Shortly after the EpixHD service was announced, it acquired the unofficial phrase of “The Hulu of Movies”, in deference to the early look and feel of the site and it’s corporate parentage (Studio 3 Partners owns EpixHD, which is a joint venture between Viacom, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate.) in contrast to Hulu which is a joint venture of NBC Universal (GE), Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp) and ABC Inc. (The Walt Disney Company).

Given the early comparisons, it’s interesting that EpixHD didn’t do more to distinguish its online player from Hulu’s early on. The iconography of the controls and general look and feel is extremely similar to that of Hulu (though it still baffles me why anyone would want to “dim the lights” instead of play something full screen.

One notable difference is in the the HD/Bandwidth throttling controls. Epix eschews having an “HD” option which on Hulu’s player bumps up the resolution to 480p (though whether this is true “HD” is open for debate), instead users can play with the amount of downstream bandwidth used: toggling between “Seamless/Variable” and “Maximum/Locked”.

This is all well and good, and the picture on my 1920 x 1200 monitor looks fantastic. However, several times while playing back “Chinatown” the movie froze for no apparent reason. One time I also had a significant weirdness where I had paused the movie, and when I hit play the audio started playing again, but the image reset to the beginning of the movie and started over. Perhaps more troubling than a few playback quirks is the extremely limited sample library of movies.

While anyone (you don’t need an account) can browse through the movies that are listed on their site (in their super flashy Flash Interface) not all of the movies are actually available. A good follow up question would be: “How many different ways are there to say: ‘We don’t actually have this movie’”:

Who Would Want This

While the comparison to Hulu is interesting, the real competitor here is Netflix’s Watch Instantly program. EpixHD puts a great deal of emphasis on their new first run movies; which is hard to see as anything but a jab at NetFlix and their deep listing of movies. Even with EpixHD’s fluffing out of their library they are still behind by at least a factor of 10 if not a 100 times fewer titles than NetFlix offers for approximately the same price ($8.99 / Month). With their current weak number of titles, the competition and the fitful nature of the playback, it’s hard to see how this is a good deal for anyone at the moment.