Bollywood Night! Devdas SAIF 2009 Shown with interval Chai tea will be served

Online Magazines

DVD Rental
After doing some quite in depth analysis of the many rent by post DVD companies around, I recommend LOVEFiLM, who seem to have by far the widest range of titles available. My testing included searching for a range non mainstream directors and seeing how many titles came up. A company called Screen Select narrowly beat Love Film on titles that weren't available but could be reserved for when they do. Since then Screen Select have merged with Love Film to become the Uk's biggest rent by post company and are now making inroads into Europe. They claim they have every DVD title every released in the UK, so if its not on their website its simply not available in the UK (you can try looking on Amazon or eBay for Region 1,3,4 imports or old VHS copies). For more analysis on UK DVD rent by post companies click here.

Downloading Films
One of the easiest ways to distribute films to a wide audience is via internet download. Unfortunately, because of the complex way screening rights are handled internationally and because several major players have come up with conflicting encoding standards, a legal portal for downloading films on the same scale as music can be downloaded from sites such as tunes, has not been possible. Things do now seem to be moving in the right direction with several companies offering a limited number downloadable films.

I will list links here for any sites I find that offer film downloads, either paid for or free (as some archive titles appear to be). Please drop me a line if there is a site that I have not listed. This page is only for legitimate download sites, so no links to illegal bit torrent etc sites please.

The good folks at LOVEFiLM have a growing library of downloadable titles either for a hire fee from £1.99 to £3.49 (can only be watched on computer screen for a limited time) or to buy from £5.99 to £9.99 which allows you to keep one copy on your PC and another copy which is comparable with Windows Play4Sure portable devices, most titles will also come with a free DVD which will be posted to you.

Love Film have now introduced a third option: Download to Burn, which allows you to burn the film you have downloaded onto a DVD and watch it as many times as you like on any DVD player. This surely has to be the way the industry needs to develop if this is really going to take off, but with prices starting at £9.99, you may as well just buy the DVD unless you absolutely have to have it right now (well in 90 min's or so that it takes to download and burn it). As with the music industry, through they are making huge savings on retail, distribution, duplication and packaging costs, very little of this is being passed back to the consumer.

They also have a multitude of shorts which are either free or can be downloaded for 80p.

The BFI have a small number of archive features and shorts that can be downloaded from their site. Prices start at £8.50 for features and £1.95 for shorts.

American site EZTakes offers features, including archive classics and cult favourites, to download from $1.99. However, many are not available in the UK.

Goggle Video and Wikipedia have a number of features and shorts that you can watch online.

And not forgetting the wonderful YouTube, which has a huge library of shorts, home made films, TV documentaries, clips from feature films, director & actor interviews and much much more.