At first, there was video rental. You may pay a visit to your favorite location, either a standalone establishment or possibly a corner of your food store, pay a couple of dollars, and return home to enjoy a movie on your VHS or Betamax (remember those?) VCR.
Then came DVDs. Movie renting became more popular, standalone rental stores could possibly be found every few miles, and since they could not provide 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 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 home. In exchange because of this convenience, you were offered a lot more limited selection than you might have if you got in your car and drove to the local video store.
The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, however, with the advent of mail-order movie rental. A subscription to a mail-order movie rental service would enable you to pick from literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up in your rental queue, and also have them mailed directly to your door. Quite simply, however, 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 see full movies online-at-home solution: movie downloading. Whenever you download your movies online, your selection is virtually unlimited, your wait time is minimal, as well as your costs are affordable.
Based on the on-line service you choose, there are actually several methods used to get movies online. The first is streaming video. You can stream video either to your computer or to a device attached to your television. You can start to watch your movie almost instantly, and also the price is quite reasonable… the truth is, a few subscription services include unlimited streaming video in your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is that you can’t save the movie to a DVD or any other storage medium and take it with you for watching elsewhere or even in the future; you are limited to viewing it on the device to which it 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 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 specified period. This will likely vary by service and be from 24 hours to 30 days.
Finally, 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 have purchased in a store. Costs for this may vary 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 greatest in twenty-first century convenience. For anyone who is willing to shop around a bit, you will almost certainly find a movie download plan which will fit your needs and accommodate your lifestyle.