I have a tendency to be a bit harsh on websites that essentially replicate what another website does much better. CinemaNow is an itunes “competitor”. The design of the site is cheesy, there is nothing really all that impressive about the interface, and the movie selection is exactly what you’d expect it to be, and the pricing is not especially competitive. 

You can download movies to own, rent them, and with a select few, burn them to a DVD. Most of the movies can only be watched on one PC, and those of you who aren’t fans of DRM will hate this site. In addition to all those negatives, you can’t run CinemaNow movies on a Mac. 

Now, I do have a few nice things to say about CinemaNow, but depending on your taste, these little facts might no appeal to you. The site is one of the few sites that has really bad movies for sale and rent. I’m talking about C and D list flicks here folks. They have a bargain bin that would put any dollar store to shame. There are quite a few softcore titles, as well as the usual schlocky horror flicks. What’s awful is that I would never go out and spend money on this site if it weren’t for movies like this. You can’t really find these movies on itunes, and at four dollars a pop, they compete with real world retailers, well. Those genres are aquired tastes, but otherwise, it’s hard to come up with a good reason to ever go to this site. I suppose it’s interesting that they have RSS feeds for their new and top movies. Their about section seems to make a pretty big deal out of their “Firsts” in the about page of the site. They’ve been around for nearly ten years, and so they were around for five years before the Itunes store. You’d think that there would have been some innovation since then, but it’s really just a second rate online retail site.