About Movie Monitor
Movie Monitor tracks the availability of movies online. We currently monitor ten services—Amazon on Demand, Blockbuster, Crackle, Fancast, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, The Auteurs, Vudu and YouTube—and update our database daily to take account of changes in availability, price, and quality. We track movies available for both rental and purchase.
The "quality" feature is currently in development: we are working to ensure that it accurately tracks the differences in stated and actual video quality between the various services.
Although our focus is on monitoring on-demand and download services (Video on Demand, or VOD), we also include information on the availability of movies for home delivery through the two leaders in this field, Blockbuster and Netflix. Movie Monitor is operated by Movie Monitor LLC and is based in New York City.
The future of movie distribution: online
Entertainment is increasingly being delivered online, and the team at Movie Monitor expects a wide variety of delivery and pricing strategies to emerge in the coming years. Movie Monitor will keep track of these developments, giving you a comprehensive breakdown of where to find the best online content, and providing analysis of the major changes which the internet is having on the business of movie distribution.
"Critically acclaimed" selections
A small number of the movies in our database are marked "critically acclaimed". Unlike other services, such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, which track a wide variety of publications, our criteria for acclaim are narrower: the movie must have received highly favorable reviews in at least two of three newspapers whose critics have won a Pulitzer Prize for film review—The Chicago Sun-Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—or the movie must be consistently included in lists of the greatest films, such as those published by the American Film Institute. This gives our critically acclaimed list a unique balance between old classics and exceptionally well-received contemporary films. We occasionally depart from this methodology, such as where a movie is not reviewed in the three publications mentioned.
Create your own Must See List
After signing up for free, you can follow the links to create a list of films you'd like to watch, and then check back for the latest availability and pricing information.
Stay up-to-date
You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up-to-date with developments in the online movie industry. We will be adding new features, including RSS feeds and email updates for our registered users, in the coming months.
Contact us.