I love your products; really I do. But I have a bit of a complaint.
See, I went out today to rent a copy of Clash of the Titans. I’ve heard it’s pretty bad, but I wanted to see it anyway so rental was the only real option. I’m generally a pretty busy guy, but I had some free time so I thought “why not?”
Now, there are no video stores nearby me. You might know this. Apparently most of the rental places are closing. I used to have an HMV nearby, but they’ve also closed, so I couldn’t even buy the movie without a 20 minute excursion, even if I wanted to. There is, however, an automated system at the grocery store, but they don’t seem to have you in their system yet. That’s unfortunate.
So next, I turned to my PS3, which recently got a Canadian video store. But apparently they don’t update on release dates either.
So I checked iTunes, and sure enough there’s a rental there. Of course, since I don’t have an AppleTV I can’t actually rent an HD version to watch on the TV, and short of connecting my computer to the TV I can’t even get a decently upscaled SD version to play on my TV. And that’s at a $5 rental cost. So basically, I need to spend a third of the purchase price (via Amazon) for a rental that will not look as good on my TV as an actual DVD without going to a fuckton of effort. Also, there is no way for me to rent an HD version today without spending another few hundred dollars.
This is not a good deal.
Look. I know your industry is facing some problems and you think DRM is the solution to them. But you know what? If I could download a video which I could stream to my TV I’d be happy to pay for it. You could have a number of stores online, and a number of different solutions to the problem. I mean, software to stream video from Macs and PCs to iPads and TVs exist, so why don’t you bundle your DRM to some sort of streaming solution if you insist on this DRM crap? I mean, a video that I can’t see is of no use to me and no money for you.
In short: Fuck you.
