Comments on: Why The Apple Store’s Movie Rentals Suck

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:16:37 +0000

Blockbuster hasn’t done a short term rental like that for many years. These days you get at least a week before they start reminding you and have no late fees regardless. Eventually if you ignore their reminders they will charge you for the disk but will refund it if you return it. Besides I understand the need to have a deadline for rental for physical media, because as long as you have the actual DVD they cannot rent it to someone else. No need to “return” a downloaded film and not watching it for a month doesn’t prevent Apple from renting as many as they like to other people.

It’s simple, Apple and/or the MPAA should make it a guaranteed that a customer can watch the entire film they rent at their leisure prior to self destructing it. Until they do I will stick with Netflix. bad business model.

By: John V

John V — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:32:54 +0000

On Apple’s side, if you rented a new, one day rental movie from Blockbuster, you’d have to return it after 24 hours whether you watched it or not.

However, since the digital age is supposed to be convenient and save us from stress, if you’ve paid your hard-earned money for a movie that self destructed before you could watch it, wouldn’t this be a justifiable reason to download a copied version? Then just delete it when you’re done.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:33:58 +0000

You know I looked into that and it turns out there is NO FAA regulation that requires you turn off PEDs under a certain altitude. Individual airlines make up that rule on their own. There was a case in the 1950′s where two airplanes collided that was believed to be caused by interference from a radio being used by a passenger, but that was never proven andno study has ever been able to show that PEDs actually cause any navigational or communication issues. It’s all a precautionary “better safe than sorry” sort of thing. I joke about it but I have no real problem with it… I just think the scare tactics are funny.

By: Emma

Emma — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:11:33 +0000

It’s not just travellers who are inconvenienced by the 24 hr limit. Say you are a busy parent who gets to relax after the kids are in bed…………start the movie around 9 pm. Child has nightmare/throws up/mother in law calls/turns out you are just too wiped out by day to stay up with a 3 hr movie……………so you stop movie, deal with Life Issues, go to bed. Next day at 9pm, kids in bed at at last, NOW you try to watch the rest of the movie.
Bad luck! It’s gone for ever.

Yes, it’s stupid. Surely Apple has enough clout to deal with the movie moguls.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:25:17 +0000

Not renting a movie from Apple is exactly what I’ll be doing on any flight I happen to take from now on.