My husband has been experimenting with our home entertainment options lately and decided to cancel Netflix in favour of Amazon Prime. He gave me 30 days to watch that Joan Didion documentary he had been raving about before the subscription expired. Thirty days came and went and I was no wiser about the life and art of the American author because, of course, I hadn't managed to find the time to watch the film.

I got to thinking that if he had given me a week to see it, I might have done it, and if he had announced the film was showing tonight at 8, I would probably have cleared my schedule and watched it then and there. Many of us respond best to a short deadline, and I belong to a generation for whom the term "appointment viewing" still has meaning.

In a world of infinite and instant choice, the options often seem so overwhelming that old Seinfeld episodes feel like an acceptable default on Saturday night. Meanwhile, that important doc or quirky indie film goes unwatched yet again. Outside the home, programmers of everything from movies to operas use festivals to generate a sense of urgency and occasion – not to mention aesthetic context for the art and camaraderie for the audience. The buzz of a festival encourages audiences to gorge on the offerings and make valiant efforts to see things they might have passed over in less exciting circumstances.

Can that imperative be imported into the home? Can a film festival really take place on the couch? Ask the French – they invented cinema, after all. Probably the best example of an online film festival is MyFrenchFilmFestival, an annual initiative by UniFrance, the government-funded agency charged with promoting French cinema internationally. The current festival – it began two weeks ago and runs to Feb. 19 – offers 10 new feature films and 10 shorts in a competition juried this year by director Paolo Sorrentino, plus a handful of others out of competition, all available for streaming for less than $13 at myfrenchfilmfestival.com. (Or you can rent the films individually on iTunes or Google Play.) Buy your ticket and watch as much or as little as you want during the festival; once you have started a film, you have three days before it expires.

The festival is now in its eighth year. It attracted an impressive seven million views for the 2017 edition – between 200,000 and 500,000 of those in Canada, while the numbers were higher in territories in Latin America and Eastern Europe that offered the entire festival for free. The free short films always get the higher numbers, but the top feature films still get about 100,000 views during the month-long festival.

With those numbers for movies with subtitles, perhaps it is no surprise that MyFrenchFilmFestival doesn't specialize in difficult art-house fare. The program is geared toward a young audience and often takes a populist approach to film. Its attitude is perhaps best summarized by a thematic category called "What the … French?" and also includes one called "Teen Stories," with titles such as Yan England's 1:54 from Quebec. (Playing out of competition, the film about a bullied teen is one of a handful from other francophone jurisdictions.)

It also leans more heavily toward comedy than most physical film festivals and promotes a rather distinctive – dare we say stereotypical – view of French culture.

Sure, there's Léa Mysius's Ava (not to be confused with the recent Iranian-Canadian feature of the same title), a dark and sometimes troubling coming-of-age piece about a 13-year-old girl experiencing the last summer before she goes blind. And there's Wily the First. It's an episodically structured work that combines fiction and documentary based on the life of its star, but aside from that unorthodox approach, it's a classic example of an indie movie that can make us fall for an outsider. Wily (Daniel Vannet) is a mentally challenged 50-year-old who finally decides to move out of his parents' home, get an apartment, a job and some buddies.

But there is a lot of over-the-top French comedy. Take La Loi de la Jungle (Struggle for Life), a satire about colonialism and Euro-bureaucracy that attempts to turn the story of a minor French bureaucrat assigned to oversee an indoor ski resort in French Guiana into an all-out slapstick yuck fest. It's the kind of movie that only might interest anyone outside of France in a document-from-the-planet-Zon kind of way. Mathieu Amalric can be caught slumming it as a colonial boss.

Meanwhile, In Bed with Victoria is a rom-com in which the female protagonist is a workaholic, chain-smoking lawyer and single mother who barely acknowledges her two little daughters while inviting her internet dates into the other room – until she falls in love with a semi-reformed drug dealer.

Note that most of these films are getting four out of five stars from viewers; you can track the popularity of titles on the festival website, where the star ratings are continually updated.

Should the Toronto International Film Festival be taking a look? Other examples of online filmfests include Berlin, where you can stream the event's short films for free during the festival. And Venice has teamed up with several other European festivals, as well as Montreal's International Documentary Festival and Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, on the Festival Scope online service, which offers streaming tickets to select films during these events. The tickets are cheap – only a few dollars each if you buy a pass – but many of the participants limit the number for sale, replicating online not only the narrow window a festival offers but also the scarcity value of a ticket.

Maybe in some not-too-distant future all film festivals will offer complete online versions of themselves, and only the most hardy, wealthy or obsessed will actually show up for the real thing.

In the meantime, I've only got two weeks left to catch Guillaume Canet's Rock'n Roll, a comedy in which the director plays a movie director having a midlife crisis in an extended inside joke about the French film industry.