As it currently stands, there are 3 popular, legal ways in which we watch movies on our computers. We can either go to the video store and rent a DVD/Bluray, digitally rent a movie from iTunes/Amazon/Etc or we can wait until something pops into our Netflix cue.

Each of these ways accomplishes the goal of watching a movie on your computer, but each has it’s own flaws. With DVD we get the movie right when it is available, with access to all the language tracks and bonus features, but we usually have to pay a higher price and only get it for a couple of days. With iTunes we get the movie right away like DVD, and for a slight discount over DVD rentals, but we lose out on bonus features and language tracks, and once we’ve watched the movie, we can only watch it again within a 48 hour period. And finally with Netflix we get the best cost rate we can, and can watch whenever and however many times we’d like, but again we don’t get bonus features and we usually have to wait a few months to see if the movie we want will show up on Netflix. Each one gets us our content, but not without their individual flaws.

This is where Zediva.com hopes to change the playing field. Their plan of attack involves a DVD player farm connected to internet streaming devices. This solves the first problem with Netflix and iTunes, by allowing you access to the language tracks, commentary and more. They also provide you with a 4 hour window to watch the film you’ve chosen, but unlike the others, once you’ve watched the film you can watch it again as many times as you’d like for the 2 weeks following the initial viewing. And best of all, they are priced competitively offering rentals at $1.99 each, or a block of 10 for $10. That’s $1 a rental, pretty hard price to beat to see new release movies.

And that is precisely what they are offering: new movies. They purchase mass amounts of new release DVDs (much like Netflix does for their mail out program) and make them available to be watched the same day the new releases come out in the video store. But unfortunately, it’s not without a catch. Because Zediva uses real DVD players to play the movies over the internet, there are only so many DVD players can be accessed at one time per film. This means that if you’d like to watch the movie at 9pm one night, but so does everyone else, you might have to wait in a queue to be able to see the film. However Zediva says they plan on greatly expanding their DVD server farm, and hope this will become less and less of an issue as the service gets more popular.

So if you are interested in a new alternative to the current ways of watching movies on your computer, check our Zediva.com. However at the moment, they’ve received a large amount of press and are currently not accepting new members, so keep an eye on their site.

Source: NYTimes.com