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Comment Re:Oh noes, they yanked your chain (Score 1) 354

I do, and it has more than 120,000 titles for rent. They also rent equipment if you need it to watch some of the formats less popular in the United States or have a region-locked device. Blockbuster closed because their market share was gobbled up by alternatives. There is not yet a viable alternative to Scarecrow but I don't think they are doing as well as they used to.

Comment Re:I doubt most people care (Score 1) 354

Of course everyone should evaluate their value, but not long ago $8 for two movies a month was a very good deal where people were willing to pay that and pay for gas and drive and stand in line and browse a cacophonous store. Today $8 for two movies a month is seen as a bad deal.

That's all I was saying. I wouldn't pay $8 for two movies a month because their selection is limited, but I would if they had movies I liked.

Comment Re:Terrible streaming movie list (Score 1) 354

I bet 'Troll Hunter' is a better movie then any of those foreign art films.

You can watch a good B movie _and_ read subtitles.

Obviously film enjoyment is a subjective matter. Claiming one film is better than all other films in a very wide net is a pretty tall order though. On the other hand comparing one film against an entire other genre is probably making a bigger claim about your preference of an entire genre than the one film. I'm unsure whether to check out Troll Hunter now.

Comment Re:Terrible streaming movie list (Score 1) 354

OMG, people want to get paid for their work

Yes, they do. They should be paid for their work. There's a market opportunity to stream quality films to people for reasonable rates that's untapped. Having a service that solely catered to that market probably wouldn't support itself due to infrastructure costs but it's an area where on of the existing companies could expand and increase their market share. I wish they would.

Comment Re:I'm shocked... shocked I say... (Score 1) 354

You should pray every night that god will smite the rights-holders, for they are the cause of people preferring physical discs. They hug their discs because they have a film that's worth watching on it that's not available for streaming because the rights-holders fear that if they allow streaming then it might be ripped and hosted up on the Pirate Bay and by not offering streaming they are remaining safe in their rights.

Comment Re:Terrible streaming movie list (Score 1) 354

There were probably 20-30 movies at this year's Seattle International Film Festival I could see myself watching over the year. Trouble is, they're not available at Netflix, or Hulu. There's plenty out there worth watching but most media companies cater to the lowest-common-denominator customer.

Comment Re:I doubt most people care (Score 4, Insightful) 354

I get one, or at most two, movies from Netflix every month. It's really not a good deal for me. One of these days I'm going to drop it entirely. I don't have any problem with the service (with or without Saturday turnaround), I just don't watch enough movies to justify it.

It's $8 a month for those two movies. That's $4 a movie. How much did blockbuster charge? How much more time was it to go to blockbuster and back home? It seems we keep wanting more and more for our dollar. Most of the time we get it, but then later when we fall a little short of more and more we're annoyed. Goes to show that you give someone a much better value and they adapt and take it for granted, then reduce their value by a little bit and it's the sky falling. (That last comment was more about the OP, not you specifically--it was your invocation of 2 movies a month being a bad deal that got me to comment in the first place.)

Comment Re:Make it $4.99 and epub, not mobi (Score 1) 87

The book is genuinely DRM free.

So is there a conclusive way on the Amazon website to tell before making a purchase that a file is not DRM protected? From what I've read of the mobi documentation there is a new DRM scheme that requires client-side account verification which does not use device ids encoded in the file by the server, which would imply "unlimited" devices permitted but the book would still be tied to an account. Does Amazon notate the distinction somehow?

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