Last-Minute Father's Day Gifts

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- If you planned ahead and put some thought into Father's Day, you've already bought a great gift for dad (perhaps even something from this gift guide). But if you're just remembering that Father's Day is Sunday, it may already be too late to pick out the perfect gift without shelling out the extra cash for expedited shipping.

That doesn't mean you're out of luck, though. There are plenty of quick and easy gifts to be found at the mall, and other gifts and services can be ordered online and delivered instantly. Here are a few that can help you out of your jam.

Ties are a Father's Day cliche. There are better last-minute gift ideas here (including a motorized tie rack to organize all the gifts from past years).

A Netflix or Hulu Plus subscription
Getting your dad a year's subscription to one of these online video and TV services will liberate him from the tyranny of broadcast schedules or video rentals. Hulu Plus, the $7.99 per month premium version of the streaming TV service, will allow him to cancel his basic cable and catch up on recent episodes of his favorite shows. And perhaps more importantly, it has a massive backlog of old television shows and some movies so he can relive his youth with old episodes of Airwolf.

Meanwhile, movie-buff dads will find a lot to love about Netflix, which allows unlimited streaming of movies for $7.99 a month. For a wider selection of titles and more new releases, you can get DVDs in the mail for an extra $2 monthly.

... And a device to watch it on TV
The one downside is that your dad probably prefers to watch shows and movies on a television, especially if he's got a big high-definition set. To make that possible you can spring for a Roku box, which streams high-definition video from your Netflix and Hulu Plus accounts straight to your television. The box starts at $59.99 on Roku's website, though if you want it to arrive on time you can go to Best Buy(BBY), Walmart(WMT) or a few other retail stores to buy the $79.99 version, which streams 1080p video (the base models streams in 720p) and has better wireless reception than the simpler model.

Roku isn't the only game in town, though. If dad's a gamer as well, it might be worth getting him a Microsoft(MSFT) Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, both of which work like a Roku box and stream the online services to a television; the Nintendo Wii supports Netflix but not Hulu. Be warned, though, that using an Xbox to stream video on demand requires a subscription to the console's Xbox Live Gold service, which costs around $45 a year.

Restaurant.com gift certificate
We mentioned this timeless gift in our Mother's Day gift roundup, and it bears repeating here: There's no reason to pay full price for a restaurant gift certificate when you can usually get one at a deep discount on Restaurant.com. The site sells $25 gift certificates to a variety of restaurants across the country for just $10. And you can also sometimes find a coupon code that drops the price further. Through today only, the code FLAG takes an extra 60% off your purchase, meaning you can probably get a $25 gift certificate for just $4.