the future of movie renting?
Sep. 20th, 2004 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxWe have one of those movie-pass things from the video store that allows you to check out and return infinite numbers of DVDs (in groups of 2 at a time) in any given month. Those of you who have NetFlix will recognize it as essentially the same idea, but without the time lag of ordering stuff.
The reason we got it in the first place was that we tend to turn in things late, so we always owed late charges. So, smart move there.
What we didn't count on was the potential to fundamentally alter our movie-watching approach. See, if you can check out and return anything, and the video store is nearby, you could pick out something that seemed only like it might be good, try it for 10 minutes, and go back to the store for something else if your first choice sucked. The movie-pass thing totally frees you to experiment - because you're actually getting more value out of it if you try loads and loads of movies than if you only watched 5 good ones a month; there's little time and no financial penalty for a bad choice.
I find this fascinating. I find consumption patterns and pop culture pretty interesting to begin with, given the speed with which such things have changed in my lifetime.
The reason we got it in the first place was that we tend to turn in things late, so we always owed late charges. So, smart move there.
What we didn't count on was the potential to fundamentally alter our movie-watching approach. See, if you can check out and return anything, and the video store is nearby, you could pick out something that seemed only like it might be good, try it for 10 minutes, and go back to the store for something else if your first choice sucked. The movie-pass thing totally frees you to experiment - because you're actually getting more value out of it if you try loads and loads of movies than if you only watched 5 good ones a month; there's little time and no financial penalty for a bad choice.
I find this fascinating. I find consumption patterns and pop culture pretty interesting to begin with, given the speed with which such things have changed in my lifetime.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-20 03:37 pm (UTC)but your point applies to old random tv series as well. i watched 3 eps of cadfael and was all, eh, about it, so the next 11 eps get dumped from my queue (i love that they call it a "queue" - classy!). i'm a strong believer in watching at least 3 eps of anything before throwing it across the room (equiv. to 100 pages of novel, half-hour of moovie). and while derek jacobi mostly rocks, csi:medieval abbey does not. see also: farscape - gah!
and fyi - netflix is doing month-long free trials now (as opposed to the lame 2-week trial) so anyone who's interested should sign up now. particularly if you live somewhere weird, the turn-around time may be unreasonable, but you won't really know until you find out.