The inflammatory title of this post is inspired by my ongoing experiences with my local DVD store. Here's the latest scenario... Sick child, need to work from home. Brainwave - go to the DVD store and rent as many movies as sick child would like so she rests and lets me get some work done. Great, takes mere seconds for sick child to pick out a couple of Barbie movies. Fantastic - get home, sick child cannot wait to start watching... my cunning plan is falling into place like a beautiful dance. So I endure the torturous minutes it takes to get to the actual menu (can I pay extra to get a DVD that skips these bits?) of a 'special' treat of sweeping through a circa 2002 3D landscape, a full 'intro' spoken by Barbie herself and then finally the selections pop up. Play movie - yes!
Minutes later it's gets too quiet. Then the screech "Mummy! Something's wrong with the movie!" So I go back in, sure enough the movie has stopped. I troubleshoot by fast forwarding a bit, rewinding, no dice. So I do the old drastic scene skip. Then all of a sudden I am flicked back to the very beginning of the DVD. WTF? Does that message "action cannot be completed depending on the disc" drive you bananas or is it just me? Anyway fast forward to me doing this a few times with the same result. I feel like charging the DVD store my hourly rate to see how they like that
Anyhoo, move onto the next movie. Somewhat better but we needs to scene skip past very big chunks of the movie so all in all the quiet lasts about an hour with me popping in every 10 mins to scene skip. I head back to the DVD store - determined to get my money back. No, of course I can't, instead am allowed to replace the movies and I go home to start the exact same process again. I am up to at least a few hours, petrol and car running costs that I am going to invoice the DVD store.
This always leads me to start pondering the future of the rental movie situation and the search for a new model. I loved the idea of a Netflix (and Bigpond Movies) model. Registering online and getting the movies sent straight to you, saves on the getting to the store, etc etc. But I am told that these services also suffer from a fragile lossy media format and typically the movies you get are faulty.
We have Foxtel iQ2 and the Movies/TV shows on demand is by far the better choice available to a consumer who wants to watch but not own movies at home. The HD is killer! The only problem is the limited choice available. If they had permanent back catalogues and a tiered pricing model similar to the store (which to be honest used to work) then I think we'd have something here.
Until someone comes up with something else then more and more people will be driven to services like Pirate Bay to get themselves the latest movies of a quality they can actually watch.
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