Amy and I finally finished setting up our new home theatre on Friday (separate photo gallery to follow when we get around to it ) and then by luck stumbled across BigpondMovies. One of our ADSL accounts (yes… we have two ADSL lines… we’re geeks, so sue us :p) is with Bigpond and whilst I had heard of it before I figured it was probably a crappy service with over-inflated prices.

I was very very wrong - I seriously doubt I’ll ever rent movies from the stores again. Not only has Bigpond movies got a huge library of movies available, its completely integrated with Media Centre which makes it perfect for our HTPC home theatre setup. Even better - the prices are decent (plus you get a 20% discount if your a Bigpond broadband customer - not to mention the downloads don’t count towards your limit), you don’t have to worry about return fees, and they are high quality digital downloads. All this aside - it’s available right now to customers in Australia (unlike crappy ITunes).

The price for renting movies through them varies (depending on how new the movie is) from around $2.00 for 72 hours, to $5.00 for 24 hour new releases (for movies anyway - tv series are a tad cheaper as are the music + music videos) and the DRM allows you to watch them unlimited times during that rental period. Check out the website Bigpond Movies Download to see what kinds of movies, tv series and music they have available for what prices and what ‘rental periods’.

Anyway, to get bigpond movies set up with your Media Centre HTPC, first of all create an account on the Bigpond Movies Download website. The one annoying thing about this step if you are a bigpond member is you need to find the “My Account” page on the Bigpond Movies site and “activate your Bigpond Discount” before you will start receiving a 20% discount on all purchases. It does not automatically detect that you are a bigpond customer even with your @bigpond.com email address - so don’t forget this step!

Next download and install the Bigpond Media Manager application on whichever computers you want to use it on (we have three HTPC’s, the one in the theatre room, and Amys and my own computers in our bedroom hooked up to our bed).

After you’ve got that up and running you can close it again and it should now be integrated with Media Centre. Open up Media Centre (should be on your start bar)…

Now scroll down to the “Online Media” row and select “Explore”

Now if the install worked correctly you should have a button in online media called “Bigpond Movies”. Open it to launch the Bigpond Movies, TV & Music rental service…

Once you have opened it you can browse through the various Bigpond Movies sections including Movies, Music, Music Videos, Sports, and TV.

Once you open up the section you are interested in (In this case Movies) you will be taken to a list of all the Genres, as well as the “Featured” and “Whats New” movies:

After selecting the movie you’d like to rent you can add it to your cart, and then go to the check-out. If its the first time you’ve used it you will be prompted for your login details (as per the account you registered on the Bigpond Movies site) and your credit card details to pay for your rentals. If your happy to you can tell Media Centre to remember these settings (credit card and login) so that you don’t have to enter them each time.

After you have gone through the checkout your movie will start downloading. One really cool feature of Bigpond Movies on Windows Vista Media Centre is that you can start watching your movie before the entire thing has finished downloading, and it will let you know how long before you can start watching it (for us we could start watching our new movie in two minutes - much much quicker than driving to the video store!).

 

Bigpond Movies also has an albeit not as complete as Itunes (then again itunes tv is only available to Americans) TV series section

 

Anyway…. I now have a new favourite toy :p Time to go watch a movie!

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