At the start, there was video rental. You could pay a visit to your favorite location, either a standalone establishment or possibly a corner of your food store, pay a number of dollars, and return 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 could not give a large enough selection, the local supermarkets just about 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 much more limited selection than you could have if you got within your car and drove to the local video store.

The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, on the contrary, with the creation of mail-order movie rental. A subscription to a mail-order movie rental service would make it possible for you to pick from literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up within your rental queue, and have them mailed directly to your door. Fundamentally, although, the trade-off was time. When you mailed back the movie you had finished watching, it took a couple of days for another one to arrive.

At long last, it looks as though 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, as well as your costs are affordable.

According to the internet service you choose, you can find several methods used to acquire 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 the price is quite reasonable... in reality, a number of subscription services include unlimited streaming video within your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is that you cannot 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 free movies online online is a rental concept. Basically, you may download the film to a storage device (computer hard drive, TiVo, even an iPod or game console), and watch it at your convenience. Since you are only "renting" these movies and not purchasing them, they're going to expire after a specified period. This could vary by service and be anywhere from around twenty four 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 anywhere else, just like any movie that you have purchased in a shop. Costs because of this can differ widely, and you can find movies priced from what you would 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. When you are willing to shop around a bit, you will more than likely find a movie download plan that will fit your requirements and accommodate your lifestyle.