"We're point, click and watch — instantly," said Barry Henthorn, the chief executive and co-founder of ReelTime. "We never stop and never buffer."

ReelTime, based in Seattle, digitally distributes thousands of movies and television shows to customers who either rent titles for 99 cents each or subscribe to the service for $4.99 a month to $19.99 for six months.

While ReelTime content can easily be watched on computers, Henthorn urges customers to connect the computer to the television screen.

Henthorn said ReelTime's streaming technology depends on a peer-to-peer network. Some of the content comes straight from ReelTime, but to speed the delivery other portions of it are pulled from subscribers' computers that have previously downloaded the content. The more users who download the ReelTime player and view its content, the faster and better content streams to and from all users.

"Right now all kinds of things are being shoved, rather inefficiently, over the Internet," Henthorn said. "Once people can watch full-screen video anytime anywhere, the tolerance for 4-inch screens will go away."

Streaming has been a boon to media companies catering to a narrowly defined audience.

FEARnet, for example, has a passion for the horror genre. It began streaming video last Halloween as the "the first multiplatform horror network," with programming that can be viewed online, on demand and on mobile devices, said its president, Diane Robina. The service, free to registered users, whom they call "victims," makes its money from banner advertisements that appear on the Web site. The site uses advanced streaming technologies to deliver full-length horror films like "The Hunger," a 1983 tale of elegant vampires.

FEARnet, a joint venture of Comcast, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Lionsgate, also produces and streams original content. The site is showing a film called "Devil's Trade," about teenagers and a cursed tree in New Jersey. It was originally a six-episode series, shot digitally for the Internet.

The Jewish Television Network had produced programming like "The Jewish Americans," a six-hour documentary that is scheduled to air on Public Broadcasting Service stations in January. Jay Sanderson, the company's chief executive, said he had never considered online distribution of its programming because of the low quality of the video. That changed this year when he saw the improvement.

"We waited until we got to a point where the technology would not hurt our content," Sanderson said. He said much of his network's existing programming involves 30-minute pieces.

But for the Internet, he said he is cutting them into three- to five-minute segments. "We're going to do some really long programs in the fall," he said.