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 copy-protected 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 successful films with which to make history. So I decided to give this brave new world of broadband entertainment a try.

A day and a half later I was still trying. Much of that time was taken up borrowing a Windows-run computer, since Miramax's Web distribution partner SightSound Technologies has yet to support Macintosh; then I discovered I needed two plug-ins before the movie would download itself onto my computer. Using my digital subscriber line (DSL) service, the download itself took one hour and 14 minutes; but add time for locating the required plug-ins, downloading and installing the software, rebooting when asked, and then going back online after the movie finally downloaded to give my credit-card information and pay, and the process easily took two hours. That's 15 minutes longer than the movie. In two hours I would have been watching not the titles but the credits, if only I'd gone the low-tech route and rented from the local video store.

What did I get for the trouble? A grainy film on a computer monitor. The version of Guinevere available over the Internet is only about one-tenth the file size of the version available on DVD; as a result, the picture quality is much lower. There is also the problem of milieu. Watching a film-especially one that advertises itself as "a May-September romance with an edge"-while leaning forward staring at a computer isn't exactly a bring-out-the-popcorn kind of experience. Fifteen minutes into the film I gave up and took my dog for a walk.