Spuul is a new app on iOS that streams legal Bollywood movies on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The app claims of a catalog of hundreds of movies, many of them available for free. At first glance, the titles even in the free section look good with a nice collection of recent as well as classic movies. The app also has premium and special movies – premium movies being available at a monthly subscription of $4.99 while special movies can be bought individually for $0.99 and are available to watch for 72 hours. Read on for my hands-on impressions.
I tried the free movie section and liked the no-nonsense Facebook authorization to log into the app. Once logged in users can check out the catalog of free movies. However, there is a catch – not all movies in the free zone are available. Some movies are restricted for certain geographies and cannot be played in India. It would have been ideal had the app just displayed movies that one can play in their country rather than showing the entire catalog.
Nevertheless, movies that are available played smoothly over a Wi-Fi connection. I did not encounter any buffering or stuttering while playing them. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the streaming is in low resolution and the video output is mostly pixillated but watchable. I would have preferred if the app provided an option to stream content in multiple resolutions that users could choose depending on their Internet connection.
Spuul’s real masterstroke is the feature that enables users to resume movies from where one left them. Not many apps provide this feature and in my books this will be one of their biggest USPs.
I could not find any option within the app if I wanted to subscribe to their $4.99 premium pack or watch a $0.99 special movie. Instead, the app asked me to go to their website and find details there. It is understandable that the developer did not want to offer in-app subscriptions as it would mean sharing 30 percent of revenues with Apple and that would have bumped up the price for subscribers. But they do need to find a better way to do this.
Spuul as a service is still in beta and I have high hopes from the app. Hopefully, they will look into some of the pointers here and try to incorporate them in future updates. Spuul also claims it will add TV shows in its catalog soon. Despite its shortcomings, I find Spuul to be a good app to watch Bollywood movies especially when one has lot of time to kill. Considering it is available for free on the App Store it should be a must-download app for your iOS device.
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