4Flix.net is an online video store that sells indie and vintage movies for $1.99, with no "Digital Rights Management" technologies like those found in the iTunes video store, Google Video, Yahoo Video and so on. The 4Flix catalog has tons of fantastic stuff — like this Popeye Meets Aladdin cartoon, Peter Sellers and Dudley Moore in Alice in Wonderland, Frank Sinatra in the hard-boiled Suddenly, black and white Andy Griffith Shows, as well as Three Stooges and Mighty Mouse shorts and lots of other great mind-candy.
Digital Rights Management technologies indiscriminately restrict your use of your media (for example, Google DRM requires that you use Google's Windows-only player to watch the movies you buy, and the player has to be online to phone home to Google to report that you're about to watch your movie; Apple's video locks you into Apple's players like iTunes, which restrict your playback to five "authorized" computers, and prevent you from taking screenshots; Microsoft's DRM contains innumerable restrictions, like the ability of rights-holders to flag their movies to prevent you from fast-forwarding trhough dull scenes, objectionable scenes, or commercials).
If you amass a video collection of DRM video from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo or other restrictive suppliers, you're dooming yourself to either throwing out all your movies when you want to change platforms, or keeping multiple players and libraries from these competing companies that are attempting to woo the entertainment companies to licensing content for their locked-down platforms by promising ever-tighter restrictions in their players.
With 4Flix, you get great movies and a great investment — because the movies arrive without DRM, you can be sure that you'll be able to play them back on devices and players from lots of companies for the rest of time. You can give them to your kids in your will or donate them to a school library. They're yours, and you can use them as you see fit.
(Thanks, Kaseiffert!)
Update: Kirk points out that many of these movies are available gratis on the Internet Archive — that's cool, too! The point of the public domain is to provide raw material on which all may build: the 4Flix store uses some Archive videos to add value to the other films it acquires rights for. Still, you should definitely check out the Archive's video selection if you're interested in more DRM-free video selections.
