Watching the newest or most hard to find movies in the comfort of your own home is a great, classic way to spend an evening. Video on demand programming is an excellent resource for accessing all kinds of movies, from highly-anticipated releases to a range of lesser-known films. If you are not a VOD subscriber, though, you most likely rent DVDs from a neighborhood video club, unless you are a Netflix customer with hand-picked, home-delivery DVDs showing up at your doorstep on a regular basis. So what happens to non-subscribers on those unprecedented evenings when you are stuck at home, with the car in the shop or inclement weather? Either you will spend your night flipping through sitcoms on cable TV, or, with a little bit of resourcefulness, you can stream the best movies over the internet.
Especially useful for internet users that are equipped with high-speed connections (such as those provided by DSL, cable, and satellite internet), streaming programming is a great way to be able to watch what you want, when you want it. All kinds of movies are available streaming, which, by eliminating the uncertainty of whether or not you are downloading a harmful file rather than the movie you intended to watch, is safe for your computer. In addition, streaming movies have all of the controls of a VCR, including pause, fast forward, rewind, and frame jumps.
Some of the top internet streaming movie sites are SurftheChannel.com, MoviesonDemand.com, Nabolister, MovieLab.tv, and movieforumz. These sites are essentially search engines with links to the actual host sites where the videos can be watched. The sites vary in quality, of course, and many of the search sites will indicate which of the video links have the quickest loading time, the best design, the best image quality, the fewest ads, and which ones are subtitled in foreign languages.
Ethically speaking, downloading and streaming movies aren’t all good, however. Of course, major film production companies have their obvious issues with these pirate sites making expensive movies available to the public quickly and at little or no charge. If the movie is available streaming, why rent it? This mentality makes the actual success of a film difficult to judge, as the numbers are more difficult to collect. In addition, some movies become available to DSL, cable, and satellite internet users before they are actually released in theaters. Such was the case with ‘The Reader,’ starring Kate Winslet in an Oscar-nominated role; Brazil’s 2007 political blockbuster ‘The Elite Squad’ was leaked online by movie pirates weeks before its release in theaters, and was viewed by an estimated tens of thousands of viewers before the film was even completely finished.
Fortunately, for the ethical movie fans out there, there are also subscription-based services for which you pay a small fee to access hundreds of films. Netflix, in fact, has an internet option available through their subscription service, via which high-speed internet users can select from the Netflix database of several thousand movies.
