I just tried opeining the content portal today and was amazed to actually see stores after weeks of only getting the 4 free movies. It displays Vizumi, EuroNews and Dailymotion. I everyone else in the UK now able to view the portal?

YAAYY!! me too

For me, when I try to play any of the 4 free movies, it loads them and then says 'cannot play video' with some kind of error.

Anyone else experience this?

Yes my content portal started working today and i downloaded city of violence from vizumi. very cool

how much do movies cost to download?

yeah me too will try buying a couple of movies later lets hope there are more stores for the uk

Not a hell of a lot of films on that Vizumi are there!?! I'm still hoping for a proper library of films to rent with a similar chart to what I'd see if I went into Blockbuster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_Alliance_Media

So in principle, it's just up to Vizumi to add the whole catalogue into this interface.

How are the prices and does it work fine? Do you pay in one-click and the movie starts playing immediately if your Internet connection is fast enough?

If anyone would like to make a little video showing those new Content Portal areas and post it for example on Youtube, that'd be great and I would post that on the ArchosFans.com frontpage for people outside of the UK to see how the UK portal currently looks.

OK I found the Vizumi URL: http://archos.vizumi.com/

So people outside of the UK and people without the Archos can still check out how it looks.

The price seems to be a 2.99£ rental price for all films. That's ok, but I think it will really take off when they don't stay at phisycal movie renting prices and take into account that it costs much less for them to deliver the movie digitally over the Internet, so the price should be at least half that, maybe even 0.5£-1£ per movie rental, at least for all the movies that were released on VOD longer then 3 months before. And they should make available the whole digitized catalogues that they have the rights for so the customer is really overwhelmed with choice. At that point I think this system can really take off cause it would be better for most people than piracy and p2p, and sales of the 605 WiFi could absolutely sky rocket.

Would help if it actually worked as well

I tried to view one of the free downloads and after registering and going through the steps to get to the download the web page 'crashed' giving errors on screen.

Can't see me paying for anything till it can be shown to be working.

How did it crash? When you were actually trying to progressively download a movie? Watching the movie while it downloads to a Download folder?

Waiting for my 605 from QVC. Been looking at the Vizumi site and the Archos subsite. On Vizumi you can buy films, not just rent them, but it doesn't look like there are any for sale on the Archos site. I don't like having to watch them within 7 days as I want to take some on holiday. Is it not possible to buy any?

Norm

The way the system works, you select a movie, progress through the payment section and then you download it before you can watch it.

The web page dies at the point where you click on 'download'.

This is a problem at the Vizumi end from what I can see, the browser on the Archos is still working fine but the download page at Vizumi simply gives a long error page.

I remember reading from the Help link on the Portal that through Vizumi you will only be able to rent films directly to the Archos. If you want to actually buy the film, you'll need to download it via a PC (but they will provide 2 films with the download, one high difinition and a lower definition file to be viewed on the Archos)

Are you still having that problem or was it just a one off?

Sype says he has been able to download City of violence and he says it is "very cool".

Tried again today, managed to download the one that failed yesterday but got server time-outs on other parts of the site.

It is working just not very reliable as yet.

can anyone get euronews working?

I think its a bit poor that once you have started to watch the film it stops working within 24 or 48 hours.
Also there were no search box so i had to go through every page to find what i wanted. this is going to have to change as the amount of films increases.

Very true, the content portal is still at the 'piano playing dog' stage.

It is not how well the dog plays the piano that gets the applause, it is the fact that it plays at all !

Right now the fact that we have a content portal is exciting.

Having used it however the complete lack of ability to actually find stuff even if it is there gets tedious very quickly.

This is where Archos and their partners are stumbling at the last hurdle, the technology is there and it does work, just have to make it so everyone finds it simple and easy to use or they just won't use it.

No i cant get euronews working. the pages load but when i click on a video link nothing happens.