Initially, 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 few dollars, and go back home to enjoy a movie 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 could not provide a big enough selection, the local supermarkets pretty much 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 can 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 due to this convenience, you were offered a much more limited selection than you would have if you got in your car and drove to the local video store.

The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, on the flip side, 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 in your rental queue, and have them mailed directly to your door. Basically, however, the trade-off was time. As soon as you mailed back the movie you had finished watching, it took a few days for another one to arrive.

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

Depending on the online service you choose, you can find several methods used to acquire movies online. The very first is streaming video. You can stream video either to your computer or to a device attached to your television. You may begin to watch your movie almost instantly, as well as the price can be very reasonable... in reality, 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 elsewhere or even 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 may download the movie to a storage device (computer hard drive, TiVo, even an iPod or game console), Read Webpage and watch it at your convenience. Since you are only "renting" these movies and not purchasing them, they will expire after a specified period. This could vary by service and be between 24 hours to 30-days.

Inevitably, it's 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 store. Costs because of this can vary widely, and you'll find movies priced from 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 ultimate in twenty-first century convenience. In case you are prepared to shop around a bit, you will in all probability find a movie download plan which will fit your needs and accommodate your lifestyle.