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If you're reading this article, then you're the type of person that already knows that the Internet is anything but a static entity. It is constantly growing and changing, perpetually morphing itself into things that we couldn't even have imagined just a few years ago. As connection speeds increase, bandwidth grows more available, and content continues to be added at faster and faster rates, we find ourselves in a time where getting our music over the Internet is commonplace, and online movie downloads and Internet distribution of other video entertainment are now very real options.
Let's look very briefly at where the Internet has taken us in terms of entertainment content over the past few years. We started with a text only internet (in fact, we can still find remnants of the websites around the world that still have the "click here for text-only version!"), and quickly watched the web evolve into a graphical wonderland with graphics and even some low resolution photos. Animations came on the scene not long after, and then the world was introduced to MP3 compression and music trading grew rapidly. After its growing pains and lawsuits, purchasing, storing, and listening to music formats ranging from streaming radio broadcasts to full albums and single songs is now commonplace. The next step simply must be to get your favorite new comedy movies online - and this it has been.
It wasn't long before the eCommerce boom included products and services of nearly every type. Even industries that would have been thought to be less suited to the "virtual" shopping experience have thrived - shoe sales on the Internet are one of the most popular products year in and year out, and there's no way to try on a "virtual" shoe! It's no surprise that very soon people had the ability to buy movies over the internet as VHS video cassettes and later DVD's, and now the various formats of Blu-Ray and HDVD. Online retailers expanded their brick and mortar stores to capture a much larger market for the extra expense of shipping, and as we saw from the wild success of companies like Amazon.com, books and media were a top contender.
While bandwidth and download speeds did not affect the ability to purchase movies online, these items were certainly a concern for being able to download the gigabytes of data that a full DVD can contain. What we saw was an intermediate step: the online movie rental. Netflix pioneered this hybrid video rental system, where a consumer has the ability to browse and choose their movies on the Internet, and the postal service and various distribution centers take care of getting the movies into your home theater. Netflix recently marked 1 billion DVD's rented via their service - obviously this method had some popularity. So much so, that Blockbuster has jumped onboard in a big way, offering the ability to receive movies by mail or by leveraging their wide network of stores, and promoting their service with high dollar Super Bowl ads!
As these services are still peaking, we see the emergence of another way to get your video entertainment - companies like YouTube have sprung up (and were bought), Google Video, Yahoo Video, AOL Uncut, and many more allow for the posting and quick viewing of short video clips. Bandwidth and connection speeds have provided the infrastructure needed for these free movie downloads, and we'll certainly be seeing a rise in the popularity of full length feature films available for download and playback, on demand, from the virtual video stores that have now become our new reality!
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