Warner Archive Instant launched yesterday, and it is now open for business to the US-residing public (sorry Canada and everyone else!). For $9.99/month, the WAI streaming service offers hundreds of Warner Brothers movies and a small selection of classic TV. Playback options include the Roku Player and web browsers across all desktop platforms. HD playback is available for most titles via the Roku, but web browser playback is SD-only, presumably for copy protection reasons. More playback options are in the works, but web and Roku are it for now. They're offering a free two-week trial.
I'm told that this is a soft launch, with many more titles being added as soon as possible, as frequently as daily.
Like I said back in February, when I cut the cord on cable TV, one of the things I hoped for most was the rise of a streaming channel that would take the place of Turner Classic Movies. That ended up being the only part of my cable package that I really missed. Warner Archive Instant more than scratches that itch. It has a few drawbacks, but the "pro" column massively outweighs the "con".
Andy Griffith as "Lonesome Rhodes" in the great A Face in the Crowd, available in HD on Warner Archive Instant
I was part of the Beta, and the final product matches exactly what I played with back in February. My overall assessment is that the service, as it stands, is worth the money. There is more work to be done to make it truly outstanding, but we know from their impressive 4-year track record that Warner Archive works faster and harder than almost anyone else in the home video game. Most importantly, they listen to their users. What follows is a breakdown of the critical specs and the state of the service at launch.
Selection
There is a general library of titles in place (trimmed back a bit since the Beta), which will grow over time. Since Warner owns all of their content, one wouldn't expect these library titles to disappear in the way movies do on Netflix and Hulu when contracts expire or someone outbids them. The variety of content is extremely diverse, from cult favorites like Freebie and the Bean and Cleopatra Jones to classics like The Candidate and Antonioni's Blow-Up. Take a look at the full listing of everything available.
WAI also has a monthly "Showcase" selection of titles that expire at the end of each month. April's titles include four categories of movies (titles available in HD on Roku denoted with *):
After Midnight
Cat People*
The Fearless Vampire Killers*
Horror of Dracula*
Isle of the Dead
Mad Love
The Mummy (1959)*
Soylent Green*
World Without End
Forbidden Hollywood
Midnight Mary
Guilty Pleasure
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure*
The Big Cube
The Black Scorpion*
Born Reckless
Chamber of Horrors
The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission
Disorderlies
It!
Moon Zero Two
Norman, Is That You?
Queen of Outer Space
The Ultimate Warrior*
The Valley of Gwangi*
Incendiary Cinema
The Americanization of Emily*
Bad Day at Black Rock
Black Legion*
A Face in the Crowd*
Run of the Arrow
Storm Warning
Playback: Quality and Options
The first movie I watched in HD on the Roku was Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. It looked better than HD iTunes downloads I've bought or rented.
The picture quality retains reasonable, realistic grain relative to how these movies looked theatrically, and nothing looks "super smooth" from compression. You see wrinkles in faces, texture in fabric, and sweat on brows. Their video compression tech is not too much, not too little, but just right.
There is no evidence of significant (or any) compression artifacts both in the video nor in the audio. In the world of HD streaming and broadcast, the audio tracks are often compressed all to hell to save on file size and bandwidth. Consequently, the movie might look pretty good, but it sounds like absolute garbage. These movies and TV shows look and sound as good as I've seen streaming manage, even over WiFi. The George Reeves Adventures of Superman looks better than I remember the DVDs.
All movies are also in their original aspect ratios, something that is not the case across-the-board on Netflix or Hulu (outside Criterion's Hulu channel).
I did run into a couple instances of audio sync problems, but this was within the frequency I run into it with any digital streaming app (Netflix, Hulu) and only took rebooting the device to clear up.
Placemarking worked well from my experience, where if I paused and exited out of watching something, it remembered exactly where I left off. I did this many times with many titles, and it kept track nicely.
I don't watch these kinds of movies on my computer most of the time, but when I travel for work, my Retina MacBook Pro is my primary content-consuming device. The in-browser quality, even though it's just SD, is actually surprisingly good. I don't see myself watching in the browser much at all, and I do wish there were mobile device (phone/tablet) playback options, more so than availability on a game console or Blu-ray player or a smart app for the smart TV I don't own. I am into Warner Archive enough that I bought a Roku just so I could use the service. I've ended up switching to it completely for streaming channels over my less-powerful, more-limited AppleTV box.
My Personal Wishlist
Like I said above, WAI is worth the money as-is, but there are some specific items (aside from more playback options) that I badly want, which I'm convinced would make WAI a force to be reckoned with:
1) Voting/Demanding Titles on Blu-ray
Warner Archive have an unparalleled potential to directly poll their target market here. Give members 5 "votes" per month to beg for a Blu-ray. When it does become available, auto-notify them the next time they log in that the movie they wanted is now available on Blu-ray. I recommen the limitation of how many "votes" you get so that people don't vote for every single movie, spam the system, and ruin the data.
2) Double- & Triple Feature, Other Playlists
Your queue is virtually useless on something like Hulu for TV, because the interface is awful. For Netflix, it's a bit more useful, but there's still a crazy amount of stuff to queue up. Archive opens the possibility of members programming double features they can share with friends and strangers. Archive themselves could create their own double/triple-feature lists and "smart" playlists, like "All Tarzan", or "William Powell", or "Monster Movies", which are smaller and more playback-oriented than broader genre categories.
3) "Continuous Play" or "Cable Channel" Mode
They might not like the idea of this, since people aren't actively choosing to gobble up their bandwidth, but passively letting things play...but I think I want this more than anything else on this list. Think of this as a random play or "shuffle" option. I used to love having TCM playing in the background while I work, clean, what have you. I like choosing the movie I want to watch, but I also like being surprised and discovering things that way. Being able to do this in combination with having it index most-watched, highest-voted, or "playlist"-specific content could be magic. Like TCM, someone else is making the choices, but you have the ability to "nudge" the programming.
In this mode, WA could weave in short films (which WB has tons of) and their own in-house content, like curator intros or even previews/trailers of that month's featured Showcase movies. Just writing about this makes me want it even more.
I could see myself dropping Netflix completely at some point if more services like this one come into existence. WAI is the way of the future.