At first, 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 several 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 could possibly be found every few miles, and since they could not offer 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 in the event the cable industry began to offer "Video on Demand." Now you could 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 for try this convenience, you were offered a significantly more limited selection than you could have if you got in your car and drove to the local video store.

The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, alternatively, with the creation of mail-order movie rental. A subscription to a mail-order movie rental service would permit you to pick from literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up within 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 movie you had finished watching, it took a number of days for the following one to arrive.

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

Depending on the online service you choose, you will find several methods used to get 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 start to watch your movie almost instantly, and the price is very reasonable... the truth is, a couple of subscription services include unlimited streaming video in your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is that you cannot save the film to a DVD or any other storage medium and take it with you for watching elsewhere or even in the future; you are restricted to viewing it on the device to which it really 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 game console), 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 will likely vary by service and be anywhere from 24 hours to 30-days.

Inevitably, it 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 may vary widely, and you can 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 can be the best in twenty-first century convenience. If you're willing to shop around a bit, you will in all probability locate a movie download plan that can fit your requirements and accommodate your lifestyle.