15 Free or Cheap Downloadable Media (Video and Audio) Resources

Two Terabytes. That’s how much storage the WD 2TB World Edition provides. Just how much is that? For those old enough to remember 3.5” floppy drives, it’s roughly 1.38 million floppy disks. OK, so what does that really mean by today’s standards? You’d have to snap upwards of 500,000 digital photos to fill it; your camera would probably die before that would happen. You could download upwards of 300 fully uncompressed DVD movies; that’s enough movies to watch non-stop for 25 days straight!

The next logical step is how to go about filling the drive with the content you want to watch. Buying movies and TV shows on DVDs can be an expensive investment, while finding good sites to watch movies online can be a challenge. Thankfully, now there are many more options, thanks in large part to broadband Internet. The lack of product packaging also means less impact on the earth, thus downloading content is, in one way, the more green option.

1. iTunes is one of the most popular places to download the newest TV shows, movies and music for a small fee along with thousands of free podcasts (video and audio). It does require you to install their [free] software, and the iTunes software is also an excellent way to manage your digital files.
2. Google Video is a video search engine. There are an enormous number of videos listed all free for the viewing. You can’t beat Google for its ability to index everything video!
3. Real, the other media player that never really caught on through the late 90’s and early 2000’s is still around. They offer the SuperPass, a monthly subscription service, instead of a per-piece download. Their price structure is right-on, but requires their media player to watch most content.
4. Amazon launched their Video on Demand service some time ago, offering most current movies, some as low as 99 cents. No special software is needed to watch movies; QuickTime on Mac or Windows Media Player for Windows will work.
5. TheMovieDownload boasts 80 million files for download. They offer full downloads that can be stored and played later, with a monthly fee structure similar to Real media’s SuperPass.
6. Blockbuster has both streaming and downloadable movies and one of the largest databases online. For Internet Explorer and Firefox users a specific extension is required for viewing.
7. MoviePro.Net boasts nearly 4,600 movies to download and offers the ability to download movies ready for iPod / PSP or uncompressed versions. They offer a wide array of genre’s all broken down by category and with a quick search function similar to BZ Results.
8. CinemaNow offers both streaming and downloadable versions of nearly all their titles, along with the ability to order right from your phone (Beta for now). Their website is clean, easy to navigate and simple to use.
9. Starz Play offers more than 2,500 titles in their growing database of downloadable movies and offers monthly payment plans. While they don’t have the biggest selection, the all you can eat billing method means you could try to fill an external hard drive on a fast Internet connection in one or two months.
10. Rhapsody offers one of the most extensive music collections online and is always tweaking their site to offer the best user interface. Prices vary wildly with them, so watch for sales.
11. EMusic offers pay per download or monthly billing options for your music. In addition to their large library of music they are fully stocked with audio books as well.
12. Napster started the music downloading revolution more than 10 years ago, making it easy to access mountains of music. They’ve changed their business model a few times now and offer monthly subscription plans only.
13. Wal-Mart offers a fairly large selection of music, however due to their family friendly ways, not all music can be accessed through them.
14. Audible has more than 60,000 books in audio format on their site, all for a monthly one monthly fee. They usually get new releases before most other sites as well.
15. MTV offers a short selection of recently released music to download for free. Kind of refreshing since they rarely have music on TV anymore.

Streaming movies and TV shows is nice, but it requires the Internet connection to always be on, and doesn’t always guarantee that the show you want to watch will be available. Most legal places to stream from expire shows and movies within 12 weeks of first being put online.

Internet radio is slowly growing in popularity, but listeners are still slaves to disk jockeys (real or automated), so acquiring music on your own, legally, means the ability to listen to what you want, when you want. The beautiful thing about using a network attached storage device (NAS) like the My Book World Edition is that everyone on a home network can access and share music, movies and TV shows conveniently from one location.

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Get more media tips at Media Caffeine.