Friday, November 6, 2009

Video rentals

I am so sick of renting DVDs right now.

If I go to our local video store, a Family Video, I can almost be assured of not seeing some part of the movie I want because it skips.

I've been going mostly to the RedBox. But last night's flick skipped quite a bit on me as well.

Back in Kansas, I had been renting movies from the iTunes store and downloading them. I know for a fact that the movie is not going to skip.

But there are a few drawbacks. One is that often iTunes for whatever reason cannot offer a new release for rent on its release date. You can purchase the movie, but not rent it. Second is that it takes a while to download.

That second issue wasn't a problem back in Kansas when I worked at the library. I'd go in early set up the laptop, rent what I wanted and let it download while I cleaned. And when I was ready to go home the movie would be finished. But we don't have internet at the house right now, and the connection at our local library is quite a bit slower than the one back in Kansas.

So I got a bright idea. Why don't rental stores offer an electronic rental like iTunes does? The next big thing in movies is supposed to be BluRay, but I think we should ditch optical media altogether and start renting movies out on SD cards.

Or perhaps even better would be to offer download stations at the store. A customer brings in their flash drive sticks it into the slot and their selection is transferred.

I don't know. I'm just sick of missing chunks of my movies because folks don't seem to know how to handle DVDs anymore.

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