In the early stages, there was video rental. You could 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 might be found every few miles, and since they couldn’t offer a big enough selection, the local supermarkets just about got out of the film rental business.
The home movie-watching market took a leap forward when the cable industry began to offer “Video on Demand.” Now you might choose a film, view it at your leisure, have it charged to your monthly cable bill, and never need to leave your house. In exchange for this convenience, you were offered a lot more limited selection than you could have if you got within your car and drove to your local video store.
The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, on the flip side, with the creation of mail-order movie rental. A subscription to a mail-order movie rental service would make it possible for you to choose from literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up within your rental queue, as well as have them mailed directly to your door. Generally, although, the trade-off was time. As soon as you mailed back the film you had finished watching, it took a few days for the following one to arrive.
At long last, it looks as although we might have arrived at the greatest movies-at-home solution: movie downloading. When you download your movies online, your selection is virtually unlimited, your wait time is minimal, and your costs are affordable.
Based on the on-line service you choose, you can find several methods used to obtain movies online. The first is streaming video. You may stream video either to your computer or to a device attached to your television. You can begin to watch your movie almost instantly, as well as the price is extremely reasonable… the truth is, several subscription services include unlimited streaming video in your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is the fact that you can not save the movie to a DVD or any other storage medium and take it with you for watching full movie elsewhere or in the future; you are limited by viewing it on the device to which it’s streaming.
Another method used to download movies online is a rental concept. Basically, you can download the film to a storage device (computer hard drive, TiVo, even an iPod or computer game console), and watch it at your convenience. Since you are only “renting” these movies and not purchasing them, they are going to expire after a particular period. This may vary by service and be anywhere from around 24 hours to 30-days.
Inevitably, it really is possible to download complete movies, burn them to DVD, and watch them on your TV, home entertainment center, computer, or elsewhere, just like any movie that you’ve got purchased in a store. Costs for this may differ widely, and you can find movies priced anywhere from around what you should pay in a retail store, to “clearance bin” pricing, to membership and subscription plans.
In conclusion, downloading your movies online may be the best in twenty-first century convenience. If you’re ready to shop around a bit, you will in all probability find a movie download plan which will fit your preferences and accommodate your lifestyle.
