Streaming Movies

Streaming media is a thrilling technology that allows website owners the capacity to show online movies or share video content inexpensively with a universal online audience. If you have every watched a program on BBC iPlayer or some funny clip your buddies sent you on YouTube then you have previously benefited from online video streaming without knowing it.

Streaming video is substance sent in compressed form over the Internet and viewed by the user in real time. And as the name suggest, the video is streamed direct to your PC through your browser. This means you do not have to wait to download a file before you can watch the video content. How it works is the video media content is sent in a continuous stream of data to your PC and is played as it arrives.

But streaming video is not just about catching up on the TV program you missed or watching a funny cat play the piano, you can also watch full streaming movies online. Whereas being able to watch movies online was nearly impossible or very difficult a few years ago, it is now quite ordinary for people to watch movies online.

Websites offering free streaming movies are now appearing practically every day but you should be careful when you come across some of these sites. A lot of websites out there offering free movies are in reality providing Illegal content and pirated video substance. Theses website should be avoided. However there are websites available online that do stream authentic movies that are totally legal to watch. This is predominantly true with sites providing free movies like independent films to watch online.

To be able to watch streaming movies, you do not need to have a very powerful computer, which is a good news for a lot of people. All you need is a good broadband speed, a media player like VLC or the Microsoft one and of course a good sofa to watch your movies.

There are four main media players you can use which are more or less known by internet users, and each support a specific streaming file format:

QuickTime – plays files that end in .mov.
RealNetworks RealMedia – plays .rm files.
Microsoft Windows Media – plays several media file types: Windows Media Audio (.wma), Windows Media Video (.wmv) and Advanced Streaming Format (.asf).
The Adobe Flash player – plays .flv files. It can also play .swf animation files.

One free movie website that supplies totally legal streaming movies is Indie Movies Online.