Many freepers are making a big deal about not returning the movies on time. I agree with you and between children, other good things on TV and playing on the web or freeping, lots of time I dont get a chance to watch both movies let alone all three. I am waiting for the setup that allows me to watch any movie on my TV at anytime I want. They should make a fortune.
Many digital cable systems have that in place. DISH Network satellite has a personal video recorder receiver, and DirecTV satellite has a TIVO unit.
Back in the mid-90s I was tangentially involved in one attempt to do movies on demand -- really on demand as you could pick from a large list and watch it at whatever time you;d like. Anyway, the distribution of the binaries for a large list of movies was unrealistic. For a cable system, you had to have a large central depository with disk farms arrayed out in the neighborhood nodes. Then you had to dump the movie to a local disk for playback. It was doomed to failure. However, today's disks are large and inexpensive so local storage is practical. Unfortunately, bandwidth is still a problem; dvd quality is around 9 Mbits/second so on a 30 Mbits channel it would take a third of the movie's length just to download it. A better codec like Windows Media might cut the bandwidth required in half but it would still be a significant amount of time. When you factor in multiple users downloading at the same time, it ends up being a "choose your movie and go get a cup of coffee/pop some popcorn" while waiting for your movie to become available.