Our choices over how we get our movies have increased tremendously with the expansion of services provided by the Internet. We can choose our favorite movie online and then have it delivered by mail. However, we can simply skip the mail delivery and watch the movie immediately online.

There are two ways to go about this. We can pay a fee and use a movie download site or get the movie without paying for it by whatever means. This article will compare offline video rental stores as well as the various ‘free’ online alternatives against the benefits of a movie download membership.

Movie download memberships have the advantage of big archives full of movie titles to choose from. How much or how often you download movies from these large archives is strictly up to you. No offline video store will ever be able to match this because they have a limited amount of physical space.

Due to this limitation, they can only provide what is currently mainstream or popular. Online memberships don’t have shelving space problems and therefore can have an extremely varied and extensive movie selection. If your tastes go beyond what is deemed popular by everyone else, then you will get more satisfaction by going online.

Doing a physical search through the shelves of an offline store is far more difficult than looking for a particular title online. An online site will usually have a search box that can search by the director, actor, title, or any particular keyword. In addition, lists are provided that categorize movies into different genres.

In addition to movie genre, their lists often group movies by critic picks, latest additions, popularity, and alphabetically. You can even write your own review and rate a movie with some memberships. Consumer reviews can be more trustworthy than those of a professional critic.

Huge archives of movies available for download are typical of online memberships. Free online movies that are actually legal are generally in the public domain with expired or un renewed copyrights. These are early 20′th century classics.

The big TV networks often allow free viewing of their most popular and recent TV episodes on their web sites. These will be limited to just a few series and will only be up for viewing for a brief time.

Movie download memberships are safe from worms, viruses, mal ware, and spy ware. By contrast, there is a real risk to the health of your PC when you get free movies from questionable sources. For instance, you will be sharing files with a multitude of strangers and will be trusting that none of them will infect your file with spy ware or viruses if you use peer to peer for your downloads.

These are just some of the benefits that paid online movie download sites have over the so called free alternatives that exist online and over your local video store. The benefits of convenience, economy, and speed, that the Internet provides over video rental stores are obvious. But the potential dangers associated with the ‘free’ online downloads are more significant than the shortcomings of the offline world.