Movies at home

Newer ways to rent satisfy readers more than most video stores do

The way Americans get their movies at home is changing. DVD sales are down. The walk-in video store, the leading movie-rental outlet just five years ago, is being edged out. Videos are increasingly being rented by mail through subscription plans or at vending-machine-like kiosks. They're also being streamed more to TVs and computers and rented on demand from TV providers.

The Netflix subscription service is the best way to get an evening's video entertainment, according to a new survey of our online subscribers by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. Netflix beat out the competing Blockbuster Total Access service. Respondents were much less satisfied with video on demand (VOD), which offers fewer titles than the best services do and generally requires that you watch them within 24 hours.

Some rental services have a relatively small lineup of high-definition movies, which have image quality rivaling a movie theater's. Yet that might not be a major problem. HDTV owners we surveyed were only slightly more satisfied with the picture quality of high-definition Blu-ray discs than they were with that of DVDs, which are often "upconverted" to quasi-HD resolutions by a player or a high-definition TV.

Here's a rundown of the latest ways to get your movies: subscription services, rental kiosks, and video on demand (all available to subscribers).