South Africa has several video streaming services that offer movies and TV shows for your enjoyment that are, for the most part, obtained via the internet, and they’re getting better by the day.
Here’s a look at three of the newest and most promising of these VOD services.
Vidi
Vidi has a selection of movies and TV series available for you to watch anywhere, on any device that has an internet connection. You can buy a subscription that grants you access to Vidi’s entire library for 30 days at a time for R149, or you can simply pay on a per-movie or per-episode basis. Subscriptions get over 100 movies, while on-demand viewing is limited to just over 70.
And if you watch over ADSL (as opposed to over a cellular data connection), you won’t even be charged for the data used thanks to some technical wizardry, so you save on bandwidth costs.
Worth it?
Definitely. R149 is actually pretty cheap for quite a large selection of movies and TV shows, which stream to your PC/tablet/phone in quality that varies in accordance with your connection speed, but you will need to watch your bandwidth usage if you’re not connecting with ADSL.
More details are available on the Vidi website.
MTN FrontRow
FrontRow is MTN’s very own video on demand service that offers movies and series from six major Hollywood studios. The selection is excellent, and you’ll find recently-release movies as well as a good range of TV series.
You need to subscribe for R179 per month and your data costs aren’t included, but if you’re one of the first 5 000 people to sign up and an existing MTN subscriber, you’ll get 10GB of free data to use with the service.
Non-MTN peeps can sign up as well, and watch TV shows and movies offered through the service using their own internet connections.
Worth it?
It is for the sheer number of movies and series that are available as well as a handful of FrontRow exclusives like Power and Black Sails, but FrontRow could get expensive when it comes to bandwidth costs.
Keen? Head over to MTN’s FrontRow website for more info.
Altech Node
Altech Node is a great idea: it brings together home automation and security, on-demand movies and TV series, internet access, video streaming across your network and even lets you play movies, music and images stored on USB drives on your TV.
The up-front cost is only slightly pricier than a DStv Explora at R1 999 for the Node decoder, but it’s a once-off. On top of that you need to pay a monthly subscription of R299, which gives you access to over 700 hours of movies and TV shows for no more money down.
Unfortunately, the TV shows offered by Node are, according to the website, “…older than three years as it only becomes available once its run on television is over”, which is quite disappointing.
NODE also offers recently-released movies that can be rented for a small fee – R25 – just like DStv’s Box Office service does.
The NODE only requires that you connect to the internet to verify your identity, and all movies and series you watch are downloaded over a satellite connection, meaning you don’t pay for bandwidth.
Worth it?
It’s definitely the least bandwidth-intensive VOD option available, but those up-front costs and the age of the TV series on offer are a bit off-putting.
Fire up the Node website to read more.
