Will you buy the suite?

In November a new wave of movie channels became available to Canadian viewers. An all HD television service called "Hollywood Suite" hit the air. If you haven't seen the stations, it is a four channel HD movie service. The four channels are known as "Hollywood Storm" "MGM Channel" "WB Films" and "Hollywood Festival". The stations have been a very rich library of movies in high defenition.

On this day I was channel surfing between the four channels between the "Mask of Zorro", "Blazing Sadles" and Michale Keaton / Genna Davis groan fest "Speechless". While the library of films of these stations are mostly older movies, there are some newer festival films that are aired.

What I enjoy about the service is that films are commerical free and uneditied. The films have a consistantly high picture and sound quality as good as watching a DVD. There are some theme night like marathons of Rocky, John Lennon, or Martial Arts films. There are some docuemtnary pieces in the intervals between films. Movies are repeated during the day, meaning if you missed it or caught it halfway at 3pm, you'll see it again at 10pm.

The drawback is that the movies on the Suite have been aired reguarly in the past, or easily available on DVD. On it's own merrits that is not a detraction, however in comparison to it's competitiors it is a huge drawback. Shaw's Movietime channel airs a lot of recent releases, often making their non Pay TV premier. Encore Avenue, another Shaw channel airs a lot of obscure and festival films, not as easily availble on DVD.  The fact that the stations are competing with Shaw for viewers has caused some problems.

The stations are currently not carried by Shaw or Rogers, but are available on the telecom company systems including Bell and Telus. With the support of the telecom companys Hollywood Suite is launching an advertising campaign in anticipation of it's February 19th switch to a pay service. However Shaw's affiliation hasn't effected the carriadge of Encore Avenue and Movetime.

Would you pay extra for Hollywood Suite? Are you paying extra to get channels like Encore Avenue, Movietime, Super Channel, HBO, TMC, and AMC?