You guys won't believe this, big step for me :)

[Mr Peabody]

First I decided if I'm going to get any bandwidth I'll have to suck it up and do business with the evil cable company again. With that done and having 100 mbps at my disposal I actually streamed my first movie! It was from On Demand and free but it was HD. I watched Great And Powerful Oz, the picture was decent, I've never seen the movie but I thought the sound may not have been up to par, there were lows for the sub but seemed not much surround action coming through but they may have made it that way. Then I got really into it and got Dish's Sling device, now my family can control and watch programming from other devices like smart phones and Ipads. What prompted this actually was trying to think of a way to give my daughter with special needs a way to hopefully be more independent. Some day I may take the next step to get her a new TV with something like Apple TV or Amazon's Fire TV. I wanted to get her a media server type set up but wowser that's some crazy expensive stuff. I could maybe get close with NAS type storage but still learning.

T

[Feanor]

Plenty of bandwidth is a wonderful thing. My daughter and I are the heaviest uses; she does downloads of various kinds and plays online games; I watch Netflix almost daily. I pay our cable company, Rogers, and outrageous amount, (C$107/mo), for 28Mbps with UNlimited download. It's possible to get cheaper rates through independent IPSs, but they rely on Rogers infrastructure and I've found from experience that they're unreliable and slow to get things fixed in case of problems.

[recoveryone]

The great and Powerful OZ is a very good blu ray movie, and I saw it in theaters in 3D and it was one of the best use of 3D I seen. IMHO once you view a movie in blu ray format then see it stream, you will really know what your missing. On Demand, Net Flix, Vudu, Amazon and the rest may be easy access if your not big on buying movies, but nothing out there can hold a candle to blu ray in PQ & SQ.

[Mr Peabody]

Thanks for the info, I still buy Blu-ray and will rent them as long as they are available to rent, the download is just to enhance my satellite subscription. It's just the first streaming I've done. Apparently Dish thinks convenience demands a premium price or they aren't worried about being competitive, not only is the BD better quality I can rent one for $1.50 were a download would cost $6.99, talking about new releases.

[Feanor]

Thanks for the info, I still buy Blu-ray and will rent them as long as they are available to rent, the download is just to enhance my satellite subscription. It's just the first streaming I've done. Apparently Dish thinks convenience demands a premium price or they aren't worried about being competitive, not only is the BD better quality I can rent one for $1.50 were a download would cost $6.99, talking about new releases.

I never 'pay per view'. Pay per view prices from my TV satellite provider, (Bell ExpressVu), vary depending on the movie, but anything new or popular is a gouge relative to, say, Netflix.

[bfalls]

We have Amazon Prime, so have access to their streaming. We buy a lot of food supplements so the annual fee is worth it for free shipping and other perks. I rarely purchase videos, just take advantage of the free videos on their prime tab. We also share Netflix and Hulu accounts with my son. I don't normally go to Hulu because of the commercials. I don't have any streaming issues and find the Amazon and Netflix utilities very similar.

[Mr Peabody]

Now that I have a decent internet access I need to look at Prime again, it's a pain when I want an album to wait until I have enough stuff for free shipping, if I can stream some content now and again it may make it worth the price. My wife also likes ebooks so for everything Prime may not be a bad deal.