A little over a year ago, in full confinement, RTVE presented the ‘We are cinema’ platform. Public television was talking at the time of a website where you can watch Spanish movies for free, promising to gradually expand the launch catalog, which It already had more than 60 Spanish films and some non-Spanish-speaking films, such as ‘La vida de Adele’.
A year later, and after having used the web several times throughout 2020, we have re-entered Somos Cine, and the platform has improved in (almost) every way in its web version. In applications for Smart TVs and devices such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick, which is where its contents can most comfortably be consumed by screen sizes and focus, it is a bit hidden and has less pampering. Let’s see what we have found after all this time.
60 to 160+ movies to watch for free
At its launch, Somos Cine was a platform that we praised relatively for the numbers in its catalog. Although 60 films were few compared to any payment platform, especially if we compare the 3,500 titles that FlixOlé has, many of them national, to be something free it was very good. And although it was necessary to dive something, there were interesting and recent titles such as ‘Champions’.
Now, just evaluating the number of films available, we find more than 160. According to their search engine, which we can find in the “More videos and audios” tab of this link, they already go for 161. So far in April they have added 10 complete films, and in March they added 23. Again, to be something totally free, not bad at all.
Regarding the quality of the films, there will be mixed feelings, but it is remarkable that since March they have added works such as ‘The Mauthausen Photographer’, which you can see here or ‘Thesis’, which you can see here.
At the platform level, on the web we continue to see a lot to improve. First of all, in the landing there is no search engine (as in the official applications). Thus, the user has to waste time searching between sections. In the Fire TV application you have to scroll many times to be able to display the more than 160 movies, and then choose. Only in the most archaic section of the web we see a search engine, as there is for everything that RTVE has.
The quality of the RTVE website has improved a lot in the last year. Not so in applications like the Fire TV Stick (Android).
Still, there is good news beyond the growth of the catalog. If last year we talked about the image quality being lower than that observed on other platforms, and that “don’t look at his tooth on a gift horse”, this year it continues to be the case, but the web already offers a choice between resolutions , Y among them is Full HD. The improvement over last year is very noticeable, and especially regarding the applications for Fire TV Stick and Android TV, where there is no resolution selector and the quality is clearly below the web.
In mobile applications, Somos Cine is also a bit buried, as a section with little prominence.
The advice is, therefore, to connect our laptop to the TV to watch the movies with higher quality, and in general, any content from RTVE A la carte. There is work pending in the applications (the maximum resolution there is 1024 x 768 in AVC), but that Somos Cine en web now looks better is still something very positive.
The most seen in Somos Cine, according to the platform
Somos Cine has published a list of the 10 most viewed films. This month, the most popular have been these:
- ‘La vida de Adèle’ (2013), which you can see here.
- ‘Champions’ (2018), which you can see here.
- ‘Wild Tales’ (2014), which you can see here.
- ‘Easy sex, sad movies’ (2014), which you can see here.
- ‘For a handful of kisses’ (2014), which you can see here.
- ‘Incidencias’ (2015), which you can see here.
- ‘Musa’ (2017), which you can see here.
- ‘A thousand things I would do for you’ (2017), which you can see here.
- ‘Cliff’ (2016), which you can see here.
- ‘Endless, what can you see here.