At first, I thought she referred to downloading copies of DivX rips over BitTorrent from The Pirate Bay. I mean, if you're going to watch a movie, it might as well be DVD quality with full 5.1 surround sound right?

Wrong.

As it turned out, she watches movies from Movies On Demand--a quick and dirty hack that aggregates illegally uploaded movies from public video hosting sites including Stage6, Google video, DailyMotion, Veoh, MySpace, Bolt, Guba, OUOU, and YouTube.

I tried it out and some of the movies such as Juno come in full-length hosted on YouKu.com, while others come in parts such as Brokeback Mountain hosted on Tudou.com.

What I'm beginning to realise with the popularity of free online videos is that people are getting less fussy about quality for the quick fix. I also hear of many who can follow a whole season of Japanese anime on YouTube where each episode is broken up into nine separate videos!

What's going on here? The box office queues are not getting any shorter and more and more folks are jumping on Blu-ray and HDTV too. Do we want quality or not?

The answer I believe is: Accessibility.

Apparently this is not the same as a passenger moving from first class to economy and back without a complain. This is about people getting what they want, when they want it.

What is interesting is that what already exists organically is an example of where services such as Hulu should be. Hulu uses the same method of streaming small screens, but doesn't have all the episodes available so it's only half accessible (new content only) and not completely accessible as we'd like it to be.

In 2004 I had a preview of this phenomenon. That year I flew long haul at least once a month. I remember watching 80% of my movies in the air on tiny screens--and I didn't mind at all. Little did I know it applied to the laptop in the bedroom too.

Next up: All of the above on the mobile phone. Wireless.