In the olden days, bargains added spice to life. You’d get a free toaster with a new bank account, or a collectible drinking glass with a gas fill-up. Old-timers even claim that at one time, you got free meals on airplanes.

Today, most of that is gone — but streaming movie plans are still around.

Netflix, for example, offers a huge catalog of on-demand movies and TV shows. You can watch as many of them as you want for a fixed $8 a month. For less than the price of a single movie ticket, you can watch movies until your eyeballs fall out.

Of course, you need a fast Internet connection. You don’t get any DVD extras, like featurettes or director commentaries. The picture quality generally isn’t even as good as a DVD, let alone a Blu-ray disc.

Still, this service has become hugely popular; Netflix’s army of 27 million streaming-video subscribers dwarfs its 9 million DVD-by-mail members. Incredibly, Netflix video streams make up one-quarter of all Internet data transmitted in North America.