Disney was a late adopter of DVDs, releasing low quality movies originally until the format proved to have some staying power. Since then they’ve been a little quicker to jump on new opportunities for distribution, including quite a bit of effort put into the company’s partnership with Apple, using iTunes to distribute movies and TV episodes. Because of the effort put into iTunes, I never would have expected this next step; Disney is streaming full length movies via their website – for free!

Variety reported on this new direction for Disney, kicked off in tandem with their summer Wonderful World of Disney series. After a movie is shown on the Saturday night series, the film will then be available online for a week. Finding Nemo was this week’s offering, with Monsters, Inc, The Princess Diaries 2, and Freaky Friday planned for the coming weeks.

The movies are available for free, which almost instantly brings to mind advertising. Sure enough, some ads have made their way into things, but only pre-roll spots and contextual ads have shown up so far. Expect more than that as the program goes on, however, probably in the form of commercial interruptions like you’d see if you caught the program on television.

Despite making them available for free via Disney.com, the studio doesn’t appear too concerned about how this will affect the same movies being available on iTunes. Besides, these movies have already been released on DVD, which means that primary concern of all studios – piracy – isn’t as big a worry.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be that concerned over piracy on any of the Pixar films Disney decides to offer this way. When you can get those movies with the clarity of a DVD (or, even better, Blu-ray), why would you settle for a bootleg version created from a streaming broadcast?