The market for downloadable and streaming movie sites has literally exploded over the past few years, and today you can find sites which have movies on practically any genre.
Google's own movie site YouTube has been a runaway success. As of March 2008, 78 million videos were uploaded to the YouTube site, with nearly 150,000 to 200,000 videos uploaded everyday. However, the vast majority of videos on the website are very short clips and the average length of a YouTube video is only 2.5 minutes. Other sites like Veoh, Metacafe, Videomotion work on a similar principle, and is a popular venue for short advertisements, home made movies and web businesses. However full movies are occasionally found on YouTube, but in many instances they are taken down fast by the authorities. On problem with these sites is that the video quality is usually very poor.
For full-feature length movies, TV show recordings, sports and documentaries other sites are available which allow much bigger files. First and foremost we must mention the free public domain movie downloads and sites which have put up movie files past their copyright expiration dates. Many good animations and movies of yesteryears are freely available, completely legally. Most Charlie Chaplin movies are now in the public domain for instance.
There are in addition hundreds of legal and somewhat questionable free movie download sites with full length movies, old and new, TV shows current and old, often archived. There are documentaries of practically every topic and genre, from every TV and movie channel. Many of these movies are often hosted on websites written in foreign languages including Chinese and Japanese, and unless you are extremely fluent in foreign languages, it is good idea to let the experts at The Movie Downloads do the job of linking you to these video files. I addition many of the bigger news channels like Fox, CNN, Bloomberg and NBC also run free movie channels where you can watch their programs 24/7.
At the same time you will find many pay per view (PPV) networks like CinemaNow charging $ 4 to $ 15 per downloadable movie title. WarnerBrothers and Netflix also provide PPV and Video-on-demand (VOD) services which are are on a subscription basis, but only with selected movies.
However the commercial movie sites like The Movie Downloads have one major advantage – the choice of videos is practically unlimited (often 7-8 million and even more), and in a much more wider variety of formats. By comparison the PPV sites offer only a few thousands, and if you watch only a few movies per month could be far more expensive. We are often asked what makes our movie site much less expensive compared to bigger commercial channels.
Firstly our set up and maintenance costs are much lower as we do not charge customers for large studios and commercial buildings unlike WarnerBrothers and NetFlix. We are completely internet based. Secondly we are connected to a huge number of completely free download sites and servers which allows us to reduce our monthly subscription fees so low. Finally a lot of our income also comes from affiliate and referral businesses, which allow us to pass these cost savings to you.
In the coming years we envisage this sector to grow at an even faster pace.