The hype is that broadband will transform entertainment, changing everything from how we watch movies to the video games that we play. The reality doesn't exactly match up. Last January Miramax Films, the movie distributor that brought us such modern classics as Shakespeare in Love and Good Will Hunting, became the first bona fide Hollywood player to make the leap into the world of broadband entertainment when it made its 1999 movie Guinevere available as a copyprotected download over the Internet. Web surfers were invited to pay $3.49 on their credit cards for the privilege of skipping the trip to the video store. Fuzzy bootleg copies of other movies, such as The Matrix and Blade Runner, abound on the Web, along with infinite numbers of amateur videos. But Guinevere is the first Hollywood movie to be offered online in a legal, non-pirated way. It's an Internet milestone-even if Miramax has chosen one of its less suc- cessful films with which to make history. So I decided to give this brave new world of broadband entertainment a try.
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