You don't have to go far to find romance, action, and comedy these days. Thanks to new technology and online services, it's now easier than ever to enjoy a wide range of movies at home. Here are a few of the most popular services:
Rent unlimited DVDs and watch movies instantly on your PC or TV (but not your Mac) with Netflix. With unlimited rental plans as low as $8.99 a month and more than 100,000 titles to choose from, that's a lot of cheap dates! Bear in mind, the online rental library is only 12,000 movies strong, so you may find yourself ordering DVDs by mail as well as by streaming video on your computer. The good thing is, you don't pay for separate services; they're both included in that $8.99.
One problem with watching streaming Netflix movies from their e-library of 12,000 titles is that their quality can seem low, similar to that of a YouTube video. To watch Netflix movies at DVD quality on your TV, you'll have to buy a Roku, a little black box that costs $100 and, according to some users, works very easily, requiring almost no installation and automatically syncing up to your Netflix movie queue (the list of movies you want to watch).
Like Netflix, Blockbuster will deliver movies, from a library of 80,000, right to your mailbox. Like Netflix, there are no due dates or late fees, and shipping is free. Blockbuster does have one feature Netflix does not: you can mail back the DVDs you rent or go to your nearest Blockbuster store and exchange them for up to five more movies.
Here's something even the biggest movie buffs might not know: Amazon.com will soon be releasing Amazon Video on Demand. This new online store has a library of 40,000 movies and television programs, and it works like Netflix: you can stream movies, watching them seconds after they've started loading. Amazon's previous video service, Unbox, required viewers to download movies, which took longer and ate up more hard drive space.
The new Amazon video store lets you watch the movies or shows you rent on any computer or internet-ready TV. Just head to Amazon.com and look for "My Video Library."
The iTunes movie store lets you buy individual library movies for $2.99 and new movies for $3.99; you then have 30 days to watch them before they disappear from your computer. For those of us who watch a lot of movies, this doesn't sound like as good a value as Netflix, Blockbuster, or Amazon, but iTunes is betting on something the others aren't: that you'll want to watch movies—or episodes of TV shows—on your iPod or iPhone. If you have an iPod and a boring commute via public transit, you can pick a show and watch one episode per day, renting as you go.
Feel like actually going out to the movies? New technology from MoPix (the Motion Picture Access Project) offers rich descriptive narration for the visually impaired and a special rear-projection captioning service for the hearing impaired.
The special descriptive narration channel is mixed in such a way that, between natural pauses in dialogue, some of the movie's key visual aspects—scenery, facial expressions, and costumes—are described by a professional narrator. Many classic movies, some popular television shows, and some new movies are available with this extra channel of narration, called DVS (descriptive video service).
To find out if there's a theatre that features MoPix near you, visit http://ncam.wgbh.org/mopix/locations.html.
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