So you went to a barbecue on Sunday and missed "Breaking Bad"?
No worries. You can pull it up on your cable box for free Monday morning.
Can't wait for Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" to hit local theaters? For the price of a movie ticket you can watch it at home right now via online rental.
Still looking for Season One of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" at Target? Just log on to Hulu.com and watch every episode for free. "There's a real sense among customers the past several years that TV used to be a 'push' technology. Programmers would push shows out to customers to watch, and consumers would watch when networks decided it would be on," said Michael Dunne, a Cox Communications spokesman.
"Now it's evolved into sort of a 'pull' technology, where consumers like the content but have busy lives and want to pull it wherever and whenever we want to pull it."
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Comcast spokeswoman Kelle Maslyn echoes the sentiment.
"What we've found is (on-demand) gives customers another level of watching TV they didn't have before," Maslyn said.
"They could watch shows whenever they wanted to watch them, and that's really helped with customer retention. It's an added bonus customers get by having our service."
With a little know-how and a few gadgets, you can become the ultimate couch commando, saving money and gaining convenience.
Cable/satellite on demand
Whether you've got digital cable or satellite, there are thousands of shows — many of them free — sitting on company servers, just waiting for you to start streaming them.
Comcast became the first to offer this service in 2003, and Cox followed in 2008. Satellite carriers Dish Network started in 2005, and DirecTV added it in 2007.
Digital services, which include digital cable and satellite, let you access free TV shows and movies on demand, and all offer pay-per-view rentals. Distinguishing between the two isn't always easy. For instance, if you have Comcast, you can watch several AMC shows for free, while some networks, such as NBC, charge you about $2 to view some shows. In addition to TV and movies, there are also workout sessions and karaoke. Premium networks, such as HBO, have their own on-demand channels you get only if you subscribe to them.
Pay-per-view movie rentals and sporting events have been around for decades and are integrated into on-demand.
The Apple TV device, which ranges from $229 to $329, is another option. The device works only with HDTVs — although there are reports that you can modify regular TVs to work with it — and lets you rent movies and TV shows from the same iTunes service that works with an iPhone and iPods.
Digital video recorders
TiVo was revolutionary when it was introduced in 2000. After years of dealing with tough-to-program VCRs and unreliable VHS tapes, suddenly there was a handy little box that kept track of all your TV shows and compiled them into little queues. By 2005, DVRs were kings of the living room.
DVRs, which are most often rented from cable or satellite services, cost between $10 and $15 a month. The boxes are sleeker because they're integrated with cable boxes. They also boast expandable memory, meaning you can record a bunch of movies, then keep them on an external hard drive connected to the DVR, , eliminating the need to own or rent old DVDs.
With the advent of on-demand, DVR no longer seems so special because there's not as much need to record a program if you can just pull it off the server whenever you like. But before you consider ditching your DVR, be aware that the majority of shows aren't available on demand. And with your DVR, you can hit pause, rewind or fast-forward through commercials.
Quick, cheap rentals
Redbox started its DVD rental kiosks in 2003, and now has the nation's grocery stores pretty well blanketed with 15,000 vending machines around the country. The number is expected to reach 20,000 by the end of the year. You swipe your credit card and pick from a selection of several dozen DVDs, most of which are hit new releases. You pay $1 per night and return the movie at any Redbox kiosk. Your card is charged when you return the film. You're charged $25 plus tax if you don't return it after 25 days.
Blockbuster has started offering $1-a-night rental kiosks at supermarkets as well, and plans to have 4,000 by the end of the year.
The Pima County Library catalog (librarycatalog.pima.gov) lists tens of thousands of titles available for free at the various branches, ranging from "The Godfather" films to "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and how-to videos. You can check availability at the branch closest to you and reserve titles at any branch.
Mail services
If you want to bypass the rental store and vending machines but still want to rent physical discs, Netflix and Blockbuster are there for you. Both offer rent-by-mail services.
Netflix changed the rental landscape in 1997 by launching its mail-based rental program. Blockbuster followed in 2004 with Blockbuster Total Access. Other mail-rental DVD services sprouted up, including one run by Wal-Mart, but these days it's pretty much just Blockbuster and Netflix.
With both services, you sign up for a set number of movie rentals per month and have a monthly subscription fee deducted from your credit card. You set up an online queue of movies you'd like to see — up to 500 at a time on Netflix and 999 on Blockbuster Total Access. The next available movie on the list is sent to you after the company gets one back. Blockbuster gives you the option to return a movie to a store and get the next film on your list rather than mail it back in.
Handhelds
Apple's iTunes lets you rent or buy movies to watch on your iPod. Rentals range from $3 to $4, and buying prices start at $10. Some DVDs and Blu-rays let you transfer a digital copy of the film to your hard drive, and those will also play on iPhones.
Sony's PSP also allows you to watch movies on the go, although studios seldom make movies for the PSP's Universal Media Discs anymore since the format never caught on. Still, you can find hundreds of PSP movies for less than $10 at used-game stores.
Of course, some PSP owners bypass UMDs and use shady downloadable software to rip their own DVDs to play on their machines.
Online
Thanks to high-speed Internet and advances in technology that let you stream video (meaning latch on to a feed from another computer rather than download a mammoth file), computers have turned into super-TVs with access to thousands upon thousands of movies and TV shows, much of it for free.
The ways you can use stream video are limited only by your imagination and willingness to purchase various gizmos.
More than 50 Web sites stream movies and TV shows, including the ubiquitous YouTube (youtube.com). One of the best known is Hulu (hulu.com), which debuted in 2007 and shows Fox, ABC and NBC shows, lets you check out new shows and older movies. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) has close to 30 movies you can stream for free online, including "Super Size Me" and "Fatal Attraction."
Also, just about every TV network lets you watch new episodes of their shows for free. Most on-demand shows don't have commercials, and some services restrict how fast you can speed through the ads, or whether you can at all.
Netflix is another major player with a selection of more than 12,000 movies on demand, available to all Netflix customers except for the cheapest, $5-a-month plan that lets you rent two DVDs a month and have only one at home at a time.
You can stream videos from any service directly to HDTVs if you hook up your computer to the set.
For both standard and HDTVs you can stream video via a device such as an Xbox 360 or Roku. Both let you stream Netflix films or Apple TV, which lets your TV tap into your iTunes library to watch films you own or rent.
Cheap buys
Amazon offers several DVDs for less than a dollar via its third-party sellers — you can find them when you look something up on the site and click on the "used and new" link. Shipping is usually $3. It's easy to find great deals on used DVDs. For example, "King Kong" was recently available for 14 cents, and "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" was 18 cents.
Another easy option is the value bin at Wal-Mart, which offers a wide selection of movies for $5. Bookmans Entertainment Exchange also offers similarly cheap used DVDs.
