Hoping to cash in on the growing popularity of broadband Internet, Movielink will provide titles you can download at prices ranging from a reasonable $1.99 to $4.95 -- the newer movies cost more. The service also comes with VCR-like functions on its Movielink Manager media player that allows for fast-forwarding, rewinding, and pausing. Movielink recently partnered with Microsoft and RealNetworks to allow movies to be played through Windows Media Player and RealPlayer, too.

However, the caveat to the entire process -- and the part that will, hopefully, avoid piracy -- is the length of time you can keep the video file on your hard drive: 30 days. After that point, it will be deleted (a process which begs for hackers to circumvent). And the piracy-avoidance technology goes a step further. Once a film is played, viewers have 24 hours to watch the full movie before it's deleted. You can watch the film as many times as you'd like within that period.

All this is done in the hope that those movie files won't be circulated on the Internet, where they become free to anyone who can grab them. The idea of time-dated viewing stinks of DivX, the DVD format offered by Circuit City until recently. DivX failed because, among other reasons, viewers didn't like the idea of paying to watch movies on their set-top DVD players.

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