In the early stages, there was video rental. You can pay a visit to your favorite location, either a standalone establishment or perhaps a corner of your food store, pay a number of dollars, and go back home to enjoy a film on your VHS or Betamax (remember those?) VCR.
Then came DVDs. Movie renting became more popular, standalone rental stores could be found every few miles, and since they couldn’t give a large enough selection, the local supermarkets just about got out of the film rental business.
The home movie-watching market took a leap forward in the event the cable industry began to offer “Video on Demand.” Now you may choose a movie, view it at your leisure, have it charged to your monthly cable bill, and never need to leave your home. In exchange because of this guy convenience, you were offered a significantly more limited selection than you would have if you got within your car and drove to the local video store.
The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, in contrast, with the advent of mail-order movie rental. A subscription to a mail-order movie rental service would permit you to decide on literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up within your rental queue, and also have them mailed directly to your door. Quite simply, though, the trade-off was time. As soon as you mailed back the movie you had finished watching, it took several days for the following one to arrive.
At long last, it looks as though we might have arrived at the ultimate movies-at-home solution: movie downloading. Whenever you download your movies online, your selection is virtually unlimited, your wait time is minimal, and your costs are affordable.
Determined by the on-line service you choose, you can find several methods used to acquire movies online. The first is streaming video. You may stream video either to your computer or to a device attached to your television. You may start to watch your movie almost instantly, and the price is extremely reasonable… actually, a couple of subscription services include unlimited streaming video within your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is the fact that you can not save the movie to a DVD or other storage medium and take it with you for watching elsewhere or in the future; you are limited to viewing it on the device to which it really is streaming.
Another method used to download movies online is a rental concept. Basically, you may download the film to a storage device (computer hard drive, TiVo, even an iPod or video game console), and watch it at your convenience. Since you are only “renting” these movies and not purchasing them, they will expire after a particular period. This can vary by service and be between twenty four hours to 30 days.
Lastly, it’s possible to download complete movies, burn them to DVD, and watch them on your TV, home entertainment center, computer, or anywhere else, as with every movie that you’ve got purchased in a store. Costs due to this may differ widely, as well as you can find movies priced between what you should pay in a retail store, to “clearance bin” pricing, to membership and subscription plans.
In conclusion, downloading your movies online can be the ultimate in twenty-first century convenience. If you are prepared to shop around a bit, you will most likely find a movie download plan that can fit your needs and accommodate your lifestyle.