by Lisa Fillers

Created on: September 13, 2008

Enjoying a movie with my husband while resting in the comfort of our La-Z-Boy sofa is much preferred to sitting alone in a less comfortable secretarial chair to watch it online. While watching a DVD from the sofa, I have my Coca-Cola within reach and our pets snuggled in with us.

There are many advantages to renting DVDs as opposed to watching movies downloaded from the internet. My husband and I love going to the video store and choosing our movies together. We enjoy the outing itself and like to look at the pictures and read a little about the movie on the boxes in the shelves. We always choose at least a couple of movies in the summer and during the cold, boring winter months choose up to six movies and make a weekend of it. We each get something we really want to see and share in the decision of choices. We look forward to snuggling on the sofa together to watch our choices.

Once our movies have been selected we decide upon our dinner plans. We often decide to order a pizza or pick up a pack of honey barbequed chicken wings or hot wings to enjoy while viewing the first movie of the evening.

Often after dinner our pets curl up nearby or on the sofa with us. All this makes for quality family time spent doing something enjoyable. We make comments to each other at certain scenes from the movies and if one of us did not quite catch something or we want to see it again we can pause, back up and rewatch a portion of the DVD.

Even purchasing DVDs from a department store, or renting them through our cable television company or a mail order movie company would be much preferable to us than downloading a movie off the internet.

Each year it seems quality family time is being attacked more and more by hectic schedules, computers, cell phones, and modern technology in many forms. Children have become addicted to computer games and websites, cell phones, and game machines. They secret themselves away to their bedroom and stay on these devices for hours, spending far less time with their families than is healthy. The same is true for a lot of adults and marriages have actually failed from lack of spending time together or a spouse cheating on the other with someone met in a chat room.

Most free online movies are illegal. You risk getting a costly computer virus requiring a trip to the computer technician or the purchase of a new hard drive as well as huge fines for illegally downloading the movie. Your computer screen is smaller than your television screen even if you have a small portable television. Downloaded movies are of much poorer quality than DVDs. There are fewer choices and most of those choices are older movies. If you do decide to download a movie, you must then waste time converting it into a form which will allow you to view it on your computer screen. By the time I would do all this and then watch the movie my back side would begin to become numb from sitting in a less comfortable chair that long and I would be squirming around trying to find a more comfortable position making it impossible to enjoy the movie. I do not see my husband even pulling up a chair to crowd in and try to watch the movie with me on the computer screen. Why then would I want to give up such an enjoyable afternoon or evening of viewing DVDs to watch an online version?

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