At the moment I'm looking at a shelving unit in my office. This unit is designed to hold DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs... It currently holds 180 DVD movies, 80 TV season box sets, and a small set of VHS tapes. In the past year I have taken an item off that shelving unit exactly ZERO times.
My first DVD was purchased in 1999, and my last was probably in 2011. I've come to realize that the "cost per view" of each of my DVDs far exceeds the cost of renting each of those viewings.
These days, I don't rent any movies from a video store (I'm not sure where I'd find one anymore). I don't even use those Redbox kiosks at the grocery stores. I prefer to stream video rentals directly to my home theater because of the convenience. I use a service called vudu (yes, all lowercase), but there's Amazon, iTunes, and other places to rent streaming movies. I also use Netflix to stream whatever content they have for $8/month.
It's not really news that digital distribution is becoming more popular. The fall of Blockbuster is indicative of that. But I'd like to take a moment to urge my readers to rent their digital media instead of buying it. There are several reasons I recommend renting streaming movies instead of buying them:
- You don't really own them. If the studio ever decides to rescind the rights to a movie (there's been some close calls recently).
- If the service you bought from shuts down, you don't have your movies anymore.
- Lock-in: if you buy a movie on iTunes, you'll never be able to play it on an Android device or a home theater device that isn't the Apple TV ( meaning you can't use 3TG's favorite media streamer, the Roku 3). The same would go for any movies you purchased on the Google Play store.
- You might not watch it enough. As discussed earlier, it's good to think about whether the movie you're buying will be watched enough to make it worth the purchase.
If you have to buy a digital copy of a movie (kids do watch movies an endless number of times), then try to find something that will give you access to your content in the most places. The movie studios are desperately trying to fight piracy and also give users a convenient way to play back the movies they've bought. The service they've come up with is called Ultraviolet, which is a service that keeps track of the films to which you've purchased the digital streaming rights. These movies can be viewed through a few different services, most notably vudu. You can even take your old DVDs to Walmart and buy the ultraviolet for $2-5. I still don't trust Ultraviolet to be around forever, but at least in the meantime you can watch the content on multiple devices.