To start with, there was video rental. You can pay a visit to your favorite location, either a standalone establishment or a corner of your food store, pay a few 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 may be found every few miles, and since they couldn't give a large enough selection, the local supermarkets virtually got out of the movie rental business.

The home movie-watching market took a leap forward when the cable industry began to offer "Video on Demand." Now you may 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 due to this convenience, you were offered a significantly more limited selection than you could have if you got in your car and drove to your 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 allow you to decide on literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up in your rental queue, and also have them mailed directly to your door. In essence, even though, the trade-off was time. Once you mailed back the film you had finished watching, it took several days for the following one to arrive.

At long last, it looks as although we might have arrived at the best movies-at-home solution: movie downloading. When you download your movies online, your selection is virtually unlimited, your wait time is minimal, as well as your costs are affordable.

Depending on the on-line service you choose, you'll find several methods used to obtain 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 extremely reasonable... in fact, 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't save the movie to a DVD or any other storage medium and take it with you for watching elsewhere or in the future; you are limited by viewing it on the device to which it really is streaming.

Another method used to download movies online is a rental concept. Basically, you can download the movie to a storage device (computer hard drive, TiVo, even an iPod or computer game console), and watch new movie it at your convenience. Since you are only "renting" these movies and not purchasing them, they're going to expire after a particular period. This will likely vary by service and be anywhere from twenty four hours to 30-days.

Lastly, it is possible to download complete movies, burn them to DVD, and watch them on your TV, home entertainment center, computer, or elsewhere, as with every movie that you have purchased in a store. Costs due to this can vary widely, and you'll find movies priced anywhere from what you will 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're prepared to shop around a bit, you will in all probability locate a movie download plan that may fit your preferences and accommodate your lifestyle.