Discs' Champion | Cinema Paradiso: Even Better Than LOVEFiLM?

On Halowe’en night, as the clock struck midnight, LOVEFiLM quietly disappeared. Another victory for streaming, and perhaps the heaviest loss yet for physical media. 

Now my position on the old, “Why do we still bother with physical media?” debate is quite complicated. On the one hand, I concede that it’s moribund – and deservedly so. Some people might still like tangible things, but downloading or streaming digital media is faster and greener than purchasing it on disc, and obviously it takes up negligible real-world space. It didn’t really hit me until I moved house in 2012 just how many shiny discs and plastic cases I owned - I’ve since eBayed the collection down to just three titles, all of them Blu-ray steelbooks, and two of them still in their shrink wrap as I can watch their digital counterparts on Apple TV. There’s simply no need in this day and age to deliver digital media by disc – not when video can be downloaded and streamed in glorious 4K HDR. I’ve even given up fully on printed books, now, having recently read a number of DC graphic novels on the iPad in the iBooks app with no more difficulty than I would the trade paperbacks. Less, in fact, as this way I can read in bed again without having to disturb my wife with a bedside lamp.
 
On the other hand, though, subscription streaming services are all lacking in content, and it’s here that the apparently black-and-white issue becomes cloudier for me. Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, et al are so convenient and relatively inexpensive that people are now content to just lazily watch whatever old shite is offered up, provided that once in a while a decent original series comes along to justify keeping the subscription. They might as well watch live broadcast television, as crazy as that sounds. Why go to the trouble of sourcing the 1970s Famous Five TV series on DVD for an Enid Blyton-obsessed daughter, when you can just bombard her with three of five Peppa Pig seasons on an endless Netflix loop? Why take out a loan from the Iron Bank to fund a Game of Thrones purchase, when you can just watch Breaking Bad for a ninth time? 

LOVEFiLM survived and thrived for as long as it did because its content library was vast, encompassing almost all mainstream movies and TV shows, and quite a few niche selections to boot. Yes, the content wasn’t available on demand, but it was worth waiting for – it was part of the fun, really. My eldest daughter used to get quite excited when she’d hear the letterbox go and the discs land on the mat. That’s much healthier, in my view, than having her stare blankly into an iPad. I’ve just cancelled my free Netflix trial with a fortnight left to run because, beyond the exclusive Star Trek: Discovery, anything else on there worth watching I’ve either seen through LOVEFiLM or own in my iTunes library. Amazon Prime Video didn’t even last that long in our house. 

And, as much as I champion iTunes and Apple TV, they don’t always have the content that I want to buy. Mostly they do, in fairness, and almost always before the physical releases arrive - this year all the CW’s superhero shows hit the iTunes Store several months ahead of their physical releases, for instance, and almost every major motion picture is released a good few weeks in advance of its various discs hitting stores. However, a popular show like Gotham, which had its highly-regarded third season released on Blu-ray and DVD in August, still hasn’t been released in the iTunes Store because it’s yet to air in the UK. Similarly, while some older shows may be available, they are not in HD despite having had a Blu-ray release – the 2005-2008 seasons of Doctor Who are cases in point. And, of everything that I do buy, I normally have to re-tag it as the metadata is riddled with typos or other errors, and the cover art has often been clumsily adapted to fit Apple’s size requirements or simply doesn’t measure up to the physical media’s artwork. I get the impression that printed sleeves are carefully designed, proofed and vetted by media distributors – uploaded files clearly are not. When I purchased Transformers: The Last Knight from the iTunes Store recently, even its title wasn’t correct – it had a superfluous “(Digital)” at the end, as if this wasn’t the norm. Worse, if you purchase a bundle of movies without numbers in their titles like, say, the Star Wars six-movie collection, the films don’t automatically show up in your library in the correct order. It may be easy to remedy (simply change the “sort as” field in iTunes to “Star Wars 1”, “Star Wars 2” etc), and indeed to forgive (particularly now iTunes are offering free 4K HDR upgrades of movies to customers who bought them in 1080p), but it’s still sloppy and would not have passed muster on disc.

In short, then, the technology is wonderful, but the content platforms that utilise it are not. To bend what’s available to my requirements, then, I have needed to buy what we want to keep from iTunes and rent things that I think we’ll only watch once through LOVEFiLM (and if I’m wrong, and they do warrant a repeat viewing, use the superb CheapCharts app to price-watch them on iTunes so that I can nab them when they’re more reasonably priced). But with LOVEFiLM now gone, I’ve had to scour the market for a replacement service, and it seems that there is only one: Cinema Paradiso, which is basically a better version of LOVEFiLM.

Yes, better. 

Cinema Paradiso offers tens of thousands more titles than its erstwhile Amazon-run competitor did, and allocates them more specifically. There are no “High” and “Low” priority titles with Cinema Paradiso – you rank your titles in the order that you want them posted out to you, and in my case I’ve had the top two titles on my list with every despatch thus far. And they weren’t mainstream picks either; my first two discs were the incredibly rare Droids and Ewoks DVDs that Lucasfilm released about forty-three copies of back in 2005 (and which iTunes don’t offer a digital version of). These were on my LOVEFiLM list for six years as “High”-priority titles, yet I was never sent them. 

So far I’ve had fewer problems with unplayable discs too – the discs that I’ve received have all been pristine. How much this is to do with the soft material (instead of plastic) slipcases that house the discs, I don’t know, but the end result is ideal The discs aren’t even branded with bulky Cinema Paradiso stickers the way that LOVEFiLM’s discs were, and as a result you can actually read all the information on the discs, which is more important than you’d think in the absence of the cover, particularly with TV series. 

The return envelopes provided are exactly the same as LOVEFiLM’s, bar the printing, though there is one key area where Cinema Paradiso could learn a little from LOVEFiLM: provide an app. The Cinema Paradiso website may be stylish and easy to navigate, but an app would still be welcome as, if nothing else, it’d avoid the need to log in every time I need to add or remove a title from my list. 

So, in an imperfect world full of wondrous platforms that continue to pedal utter shite, clunky old physical media still has a champion: Cinema Paradiso, where the content comes first, not the platform. And after all, isn’t it the content that matters? People seem to be forgetting…

Cinema Paradiso are currently offering a fourteen-day, no-obligation free trial.Prices thereafter are almost identical to LOVEFiLM’s.