In brighter, more happy news, I found an awesome way to watch first-rate movies for free online… and it is legal too. In the past week, I’ve rented Wolves of Wall Street, Gravity, and Thor (The Dark World). I’ve also gotten a free Pandora Premium subscription. All this brought by an application called HitBliss. HitBliss pays you to watch commercials. Yes, that sounds terrible, but please stick with me for a couple of minutes. It isn’t as bad as it sounds.

The commercials are actually very good ones. Typically they are public service announcements like this funny video from Fatherhood.gov:

As you watch the commercials you earn money. That money can be spent with several HitBliss partners such as Amazon Instant Video and Pandora. You can give them some information about yourself to earn money faster watching fewer commercials. I estimate that I earn around $8 in 25 minutes. That’s nearly $20 an hour.

It would be nice to just get that deposited into a Paypal account, but I’ll take the free movies and Pandora. You may be tempted to just start the commercials and go get your popcorn ready. However, you need to pay some attention. The application requires you to click on a spot every couple of commercials, just so that they know you are there. I think that’s a fair trade. At least they don’t ask you questions about the commercials and make it tedious. I’ve found that I can do the clicking while doing something else (like a TV show that I’m half interested in).

When you reach $6 you stop earning money, so you have to spend it down. The movies are rentals, so you can’t simply just buy them to spend down your money. However, there’s a great service called PlayLater that works with Amazon Instant Video to preserve your rentals (I’m not sure how PlayLater is legal, but I’m not going to question it.) So you could earn enough for a movie, rent it, save it to watch later, and earn more. The only thing stopping you from watching the entire Amazon Instant Video catalog for free is that you are limited to renting 3 movies a week.

What do you think? Is HitBliss worth it or not? Or do you just want more details about the terrorist threat? Either way, let me know in the comments.