Tonight I registered and joined Guba. Wrote in the past that I was excited about Guba’s move to provide more realistic, fair pricing for legal online, downloadable movies. It shouldn’t be the same or more for downloading movies online than it is to get in the car and go buy the DVD. My benchmark test for movies to date has been The Cave DVD which was on sale at Best Buy for $9.99 USD. The quality of the movie aside, when we are seeing this sold online for more than $25 and it can’t even be burned to DVD, that’s outrageous.

What does Guba sell The Cave for? $9.99. When you factor in gas for driving to the store, not to mention time, that’s what I’ve been talking about.

I have no idea of the quality of the Guba service or the movies themselves, but I’m signed up now and will be doing some business with them soon. Will have to report later on whether the quality of the movies was good and how easy/hard it was to burn to DVD.

A few things I don’t like about Guba
Guba requires Internet Explorer for full site functionality. Come on, it’s really lame not to support at least the three main browers: IE, Firefox and Safari for all features. It would be nice to also support Opera.

It also appears to be a United States only thing which is a definite bummer for our friends abroad:

With our sincerest apologies to non-United States and Apple, Linux and other non-Windows users, in order to enjoy the GUBA Premium service, you must be located in the United States, and use Windows 2000 or XP with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher, which support the Windows Media Digital Rights Management System as required by our premium content providers. We will add other DRM support as soon as it becomes available and approved by major premium content providers.

The Guba affiliate program pays 25 cents for each free signup by linking to videos on Guba’s site. I signed up for it and just for disclaimer purposes there are no links to videos that pay us a quarter in this post. I didn’t see a way to link to The Cave with an affiliate link, so that’s a straight link above. It also doesn’t appear to be one of the titles that can be rented for 99 cents. Too bad.

If any other readers who are signed up with Guba know how to link to Guba or movie titles with an affiliate code, please let me know below. Not a big deal though as I didn’t sign up for Guba because of the affiliate program, I signed up after seeing it was available.

More on Guba’s service another day. In the meantime I’d be curious to read below your experiences with Guba, if any. Good, bad, or indifferent. Anybody else tried Guba out yet?

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