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 super market, pay a number of dollars, and return 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 give a big enough selection, the local supermarkets pretty much got out of the see movie rental business.

The home movie-watching market took a leap forward when 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 house. 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 your local video store.

The problem of limited selection was quickly solved, however, with the creation of mail-order movie rental. A subscription to a mail-order movie rental service would allow you to pick from literally tens of thousands of movie titles, set them up in your rental queue, and have them mailed directly to your door. Essentially, even though, the trade-off was time. As soon as you mailed back the film you had finished watching, it took a couple of days for the following one to arrive.

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

Determined by the internet service you choose, there are several methods used to obtain movies online. The very first is streaming video. You may stream video either to your computer or to a device attached to your television. You may begin to watch your movie almost instantly, and also the price is extremely reasonable… actually, a couple of subscription services include unlimited streaming video in your membership package. The one drawback to streaming video is that you can’t save the movie to a DVD or other storage medium and take it with you for watching elsewhere or even in the future; you are limited 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 are going to expire after a particular period. This can vary by service and be between 24 hours to 30-days.

Finally, it’s 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 will vary widely, and you will find movies priced anywhere from around 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. If you are ready to shop around a bit, you will in all probability find a movie download plan that can fit your preferences and accommodate your lifestyle.