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Traveling Film Buffs Save Money
The Travel Technologist · January 10, 2002

James Lick avoids some of the worst entertainment programming on earth and saves money at the same time by traveling with his portable computer.

"I use my laptop to watch movies on the plane," says the Santa Clara, CA, systems administrator. Not only does it save him $6 on a headset rental, but it also lets him choose which movie to watch, and when to watch it. "The 15-inch screen is also much better than the fuzzy six-inch screen in [the seatback]."

Just when tech travelers thought they'd found a way to get rid of their heavy notebook PCs once and for all, the airlines' abysmal in-flight entertainment is giving them a reason to bring their computers along.

Sure, we've complained about the quality of airborne cinema for years now, but I think it's hit a low point. On a recent flight from Vienna to Washington, one of the featured films was Witness, a 17-year-old movie starring a young-looking Harrison Ford and a very thin Kelly McGillis.

That's not entertainment. It's torture.

But taking a DVD on a trip creates other problems. If you rent the film, the clock is running and late charges are all but inevitable. You could buy the movie, but what if you don't like it?

One of the better solutions I've found is a service called NetFlix, which lets you rent DVDs by mail and return them at your leisure. The entry-level membership costs $19.95 a month and allows you to take up to three films at a time. It offers more than 10,000 titles, including difficult-to-find foreign films and classics.

I had a chance to test NetFlix for myself and got hooked on its website, of all things. Once you sign up, the site tries to identify your taste in films by asking you to rate movies you've already seen. After you've evaluated a few DVDs it begins to make recommendations based on your previous selections. While the system isn't perfect (it keeps trying to persuade me to rent old Spaghetti Westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), it's been able to point me in the right direction on some other choices.

NetFlix is also easy to use. The DVDs ship with postage-paid envelopes stripped of the bulky box that you normally rent your movie from at brick-and-mortar stores like Blockbuster. Once you return the film, another one automatically ships. It's the perfect film rental service for the busy traveler.

What if you don't own a PC? No problem. InMotion Pictures, a Jacksonville, FL, movie rental company, lets you rent both DVDs and players at its 15 airport locations. You can find an InMotion booth in busy airports like Atlanta, Denver, and Las Vegas. Choose from more than 180 titles and mail them back when you arrive at your destination.

Barney Freedman, the company's co-founder, recommends reserving the movie you want before getting to the airport. A DVD player plus a rental costs $12 a day. A five-day film rental will set you back by $5, which is still $1 less than a headset rental on a plane. All told, renting a DVD player may not be as cost-effective as using your PC, but it's better than having to endure the oldie that your airline probably managed to get royalty-free from its distributor.

I wish this solved, once and for all, the B-movie problem on planes. While it addresses the films, it also creates another more enduring hurdle: What to do when the battery runs out. For now, there's no simple way around the infamously short-lived laptop batteries. But I'm encouraged by Apple's approach to digital audio on its new iPod device, which serves up 1,000 songs with 10 hours of battery life.

Now if they could only do that for DVDs…

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on SmarterLiving.com.