5punk

I've got into the habit of being able to download my games via the likes of Steam or Impulse, install and then play them on pretty much any PC I want, provided I've logged into an account or applied a serial key of some kind. The media market is being fucking slow to catch up and I still have to either buy a DVD from a shop (that involves leaving the house ), mail ordering or Downloading off some pay to view site like Blinkbox. The latter is great, but it applies the license to the first machine it comes across, so I'm invariably stuck watching movies on my PC. The Boxee Box I bought sadly does not support pay to view stuff (yet), which is annoying - in many other ways it's been pretty good. So, short of forking out for a laptop specifically to be a media player for my TV, I either have to spend hours ripping DVDs or resort to sweepage. Now I figure that if I buy the thing on DVD first, then sweep to save the hassle of having to rip everthing I'm at least following the spirit of the law (and giving money to the deserving producers etc etc), but it risks coming with a lot of shit I don't want, low quality, and with recent precedents could risk my ISP banning me, which narf is ravingly homosexual and completely left handed.

At least Boxee lets me watch BBC iPlayer on the TV. That in itself is pretty neat.

They are being slow to catch up and there aren't many legal options - even copying a DVD you own is technically illegal. I have a few "triple-play" titles that give you a BluRay, DVD and a digital copy - which claims you can watch it "anywhere" including on mobile devices, but I don't know if it registers with the first device it sees or not.

Consoles provide one solution, since as well as streaming pretty much any media your PC can see they also have film rental services like Lovefilm and Mubi which can deliver content through the interwebs - and of course you can get something similar with Sky or Virgin's pay-per-view services, or by using Blockbuster/Lovefilm's more traditional mail-out-DVD's services.

All of those are pretty expensive options though and you have to go back to the early days of VCRs to find a cheap solution. People used to start up Home Video Clubs where members would either contribute a few films or a small weekly sub to fill a pool of money to buy more and would meet up a couple of times a week to swap titles. These mostly fell apart as the novelty of having a film to watch in your own home began to wear off and most corner shops and garages began to offer small-scale rental services. Then Blockbuster came along and offered everyone more choice, which people decided they were willing to pay more for.

We did something reasonably workable once at work with a web page and a database of films everyone owned, you requested stuff and the owner would bring it in to work the next day. It would get a bit pricey with postage and hard to manage who had who's films if you tried that over the internet, though.

Like FJ says, most legitimate options are rather costly, and tend to not have a great selection. That latter part is slowly improving, but the former isnt.
Having said that, I've used the rental thingy on the xbox a couple of times, and its not actually that much more than renting from Blockbusters used to be, I suppose. It is pretty good too, as long as you have a decent net connection. I'm on sillyfast cable and can easily stream in HD with no issues.
Other than that, we have a Lovefilm account (im not sure why, its mrs jooses idea) which comes with a bunch of free to stream stuff. That is pretty crappy quality at the moment; its fine for something you have on in the background, or streaming to a small screen like my iPad, but on the telly it looks terrible. The only other (legitimate) thing ive tried is iTunes, and thats only because I get a free rental every week with my Orange deal. Excellent quality, but DRM'd up the butthole.