Movie downloads/streaming

[Overdose]

Is it possible to download movies in a similar way to music? I would like to have a similar setup with movies, as with my music, ie all on HDD.

Is this possible/legal? I understand that backing up is illegal in this country at least, so surely there are ways to legally obtain the movies?

 

[professorhat]

You can download some movies through the likes of iTunes (use an Apple TV to easily stream them) and the PSN store (on PS3). Also, a lot of Blu-rays come with digital copies these days which can be stored on your hard drive / within iTunes and streamed with an appropriate streamer.

However, it's certainly not as widespread as music download services are, and most companies seem to be concentrating on streaming movies rather than offering them as downloads.

 

[MajorFubar]

Companies which do offer streaming, such as lovefilm, certainly haven't yet thrown themselves at it with gay abandon. You get the feeling they offer it as a novelty add-on.
iTunes kind of do it as well, but their time-limited 'pay-per-film' approach again looks half-hearted.

For some reason we appear to be at least several years away from a "Spotify for movies". I don't think it's an infrastructure thing either, which has been previously suggested as the reason: YouTube 720 and 1080 videos, and the likes of iPlayer, show that the infrastructure can deliver reasonable-quality audio and video on the fly even through BT landlines. Certainly with YouTube, there must be millions of people streaming from there at any one time.

 

[Overdose]

Well, I'm currently having 'issues' with some DVDs on a Linux HTPC, mainly I believe, due to DRM.

Open source software is frowned upon by the large corporations, so it would appear that any obstacles to mainstream movie downloads would be related to DRM, rather annoying and limiting.