I have been known to rent the occasional movie, you know the feeling, you fancy watching something new (there’s no feeling like it) or you’ve looked through your (extensive) collection and not been inspired by anything, maybe you missed something at the cinema and want to check it out. So I dust off my Blockbuster card, hop in the car, charge to the nearest branch and pay half what it’ll cost me to buy it in three months. Near instant gratification.
Which is why I don’t get renting movies by post. Everyone seems to be getting in on it now, from Netflix and LOVEFiLM.com to Amazon , Tesco and even Blockbuster themselves. They may well have an extensive catalogue, it may be cheaper per movie and far more convenient (although it depends on how far the post box is) but I still don’t get it. What do you do when you suddenly want to watch something? When you want to watch a specific new release? And they all want you to pay a flat-rate monthly fee based on how many movies you want a month, or at a time, which means that, unless you’re watching several each and every month, it’s cheaper to visit Blockbuster, even at their extortionate prices.
I certainly don’t have time to watch as many as I’d need to to make it worth my while, and I’m not sure there are enough movies for me to watch in order to make it worth my while. Every now and again I might like to rent one obscure thing that I haven’t seen and you can’t find anywhere, but one-off rentals aren’t possible. Personally, they don’t appeal to me, but they seem to be doing alright, so obviously a lot of people think it’s a great service. It looks like it’s under threat to me too.
Movie downloads have been talked about for a while now and slowly they’re becoming a reality with Apple apparently leading the charge. I know that Amazon are looking to go this way too, as are many of the cable companies with on-demand movies. Why wait a couple of days for a movie by post when you can download it overnight? With increasing broadband speeds the time will drop and you’ll be able to watch it as it downloads, or while watching TV, certainly in the time it takes to drive to the rental shop. The lack of physical storage, postage and production costs (i.e. printing DVDs) will mean prices are cheaper and individual downloads will become feasible and profitable at reasonable prices (at a few gigabytes of storage per film, with storage costs as low as they are now, it’d be perfectly economical to keep really obscure stuff available too). Roll on movie downloads.
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