From the beginning, there was video rental. You may pay a visit to your favorite location, either a standalone establishment or perhaps a corner of your grocery store, pay several 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 may very well be found every few miles, and since they couldn’t offer a large 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 might choose a film, view it at your leisure, have it charged to your monthly cable bill, and never need to leave your house. In exchange for this convenience, you were offered a significantly more limited selection than you would have if you got in your car and drove to your local video store.

The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, alternatively, 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 also have them mailed directly to your door. Basically, however, the trade-off was time. Once you mailed back the film you had finished watching, it took several days for another one to arrive.

At long last, it looks as however 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 on-line service you choose, you’ll find several methods used to obtain 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 can start to watch your movie almost instantly, and also the price is extremely reasonable… the truth is, a number of subscription services include unlimited streaming video in your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is the fact 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 restricted to viewing it on the device to which it’s streaming.

Another method used to download movies online is a rental concept. Basically, you can 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 are going to expire after a particular period. This may vary by service and be from 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, as with every movie that you’ve got purchased in a shop. Costs for this may differ widely, and you can find movies priced between what you will pay in a retail store, linked website to “clearance bin” pricing, to membership and subscription plans.

In conclusion, downloading your movies online can be the greatest in twenty-first century convenience. For anybody who is ready to shop around a bit, you will most likely find a movie download plan that can fit your preferences and accommodate your lifestyle.