1. A method of distributing movies to customer households comprising the steps of: blanket transmitting a plurality of movies to customer households in a digital, highly compressed, low resolution form that cannot be played back with acceptable resolution after conventional decoding; permitting each customer household to preselect and record desired movies in the highly compressed form in which they are transmitted; decoding those movies that the customer household wishes to view with conventional decoding, followed by image enhancement to increase the resolution of the movie to acceptable resolution; permitting each customer household to play back for viewing any recorded movies that the customer household wishes to view; communicating movie playback information from each customer household to a central controller system; and billing customer households for those recorded movies that are actually played back for viewing.