5 ms·
The cost is part of the reasons those never really caught on, not just participation. The number of titles I (and I assume, most people) will watch enough to wa
by lostcolony 4y ago
The cost is part of the reasons those never really caught on, not just participation. The number of titles I (and I assume, most people) will watch enough to warrant paying $20 for is vanishingly small. Even $4 a rental is a hard bar to pass at this point with streaming competing.
$1-2 to rent though? I'd be all over that. Weirdly, that's the cost to rent a physical disk at Redbox...but an on demand title anywhere is higher than that. Despite a streaming solution being cheaper to distribute, the fact it's more convenient/desirable, I guess, means it costs enough to price it outside of what I want to pay.
This feels like a really inefficient market.
- svachalek 4y agoNetflix used to be an unlimited dvd rental service. It turned into the same thing without the mail step, so of course we stopped using it. I think if we had known what streaming would look like today, a lot of people including myself would have held on tighter.
- gh02t 4y agoExcept back in the DVD rental days, Netflix could rent out basically everything instead of having to fight for exclusive content rights. You could subscribe to Netflix or go to Blockbuster but you could get the same selection more or less at either.
- LVB 4y agoI let go of DVDs for quite some time but have re-enabled https://dvd.netflix.com https://dvd.netflix.com recently. Good selection, plus the much slower act of selecting, receiving and exchanging is sort of a welcome restricted diet compared to the endless buffet over the past decade.
- ghaff 4y agoIt's OK although the back catalog has rotted a lot. I suspect that they repurchase a lot fewer disks that have been reported as defective for older films. I agree in general that most people dismiss this as an option--or even consider it weird--but many people I know who are much more into films than TV find this a good option. I do off-and-on myself.
- dylan604 4y agoThe one thing about the DVD aspect of it is that DVD content just looks bad on my current viewing screen. Blu-ray discs are okay. However, the DVD catalog is much much larger. Whachagonnado
- ghaff 4y agoI admit I'm still at just HD. And getting rid of that TV with a higher-res one would be something of a task. So I mostly just stick with regular DVDs and HD streaming content.
- m463 4y agoused dvd stores can be fun
- jbverschoor 4y agoThe problem with pay per item is that they try to stretch and tretch the amount of items/movies/episodes you watch. Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.
- foota 4y agoI think your s key is broken
- ben0x539 4y ago"serie" is the singular for series in a bunch of languages, which honestly makes more sense than having a singular noun ending in s and the plural form being identical to the singular.
- DonHopkins 4y agoToo bad it triggers Apple's digital assistant.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoThe post is written in english.
- ben0x539 4y agook, to be clearer, i don't think their s key is actually broken!
- davidw 4y agoI kind of long for the sitcoms of my youth. Something like Night Court, where it's a half an hour of jokes and then you're done. It's nice and relaxing and doesn't try and hook you into watching hours on end.
- brimble 4y agoI would do a whole lot more digital rentals if the prices weren't so damn high. How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once? How can I watch 20 hours of stuff on HBO in 4k for like $10 or $12 or whatever that runs now for a month, but a single 2-hour movie is $5? It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once? Price discrimination or price segmentation is the technical name. If you are selling an identical good which has near zero marginal cost to reproduce, then the way to maximize your profit is to sell it to each person for the maximum they are willing to pay. Ideally, you want to sell (or rent) the same movie or tv show or song to someone willing to pay $5 for $5, $10 for $10, and $1 for $1. In practice, it is logistically infeasible to target each and every person’s maximum price, but you can try to target populations as a whole. For example, grocery stores with no discount to people who are willing to pay more, versus giving out paper coupons or online coupons to those willing to spend time to save money. In media’s case, I am assuming that the media sellers are betting the people willing to buy online are willing to pay more, on average, than people willing to go through all the trouble of renting a physical disk. At least in my case, it would ring true. If I really wanted to see something, I would not care about paying $5 in the moment on my TV and start watching in seconds, rather than remembering to get and dealing with a disc from a Redbox kiosk for $1. But there are people who would want to save the $4, and so the content sellers are able to get $5 from me and $1 from the person using Redbox (although they are also losing sales from people not willing to buy at $5 online, and not willing to pay $1 at a Redbox, but the bet is that population is smaller than the total of the other populations).
- mason55 4y agoTo put it another way, you're literally paying for convenience.