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Comment by j-c-hewitt | Hacker News Reader

Rentals would be more appealing if the prices on the main services weren't so sky-high. Why is it that you can buy a 2-year-old AAA game (equivalent to a summer blockbuster) indefinitely for somewhere between $5-20 when it's on sale, but it costs at least $4 to rent an old movie for just a day in HD and sometimes more like $8? Instead of pricing taking digital into account movie studios keep trying to protect their DVD/bluray pricing.

In the end for a popular movie it's often a better experience to just pirate it. Netflix churns through movies so frequently that actually finding something that's not sub-Kangaroo Jack in quality takes longer than just torrenting.

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Also Netflix's quality is just shit. I have a good connection. Fast.com (which measures bandwidth to Netflix servers) shows a solid 100Mbps (which is what I pay for). Then why does my movie start off worse than a 10 year old DVD? Even youtube is better.

I've been very disappointed by this as well - I pay for a 4k Netflix subscription, but can't actually use it on any devices. Linux is restricted to 720p due to copyright protections, and my older tv is restricted to 1080p since it doesn't have new enough HDMI ports (again due to copyright restrictions).

It was only recently that Windows got 4k Netflix, and that comes with a big bag of caveats. It's gotta be one of a handful of Nvidia GPUs, using a recent driver, only on monitors that support the right version of HDCP, and only through the Netflix app (ie: no web streaming).

Yeah, piracy seems way easier, better, and cheaper..

The downside is that you don’t get to support the media you enjoy through purchase or Netflix metrics, that kind of thing. It probably skews the ability of streaming services et al to learn what people who know how to pirate watch. Given that pirates skew to a very desirable youth demographic, that’s no good at all.

Still, they’re giving us few good choices.

In general, a lot of digital back catalog pricing doesn't make a lot of sense. It's true with Kindle books as well. A lot of the time I can get a used paperback for the cost of S&H while the Kindle version is still $9.99. I assume it comes down to a general reluctance to put potentially downward pressure on overall pricing by discounting things that aren't ever going to be significant moneymakers in the grand scheme of things.

You can thank Apple for the idiocy of eBook pricing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.

Exactly, I switched from streaming services and rentals to Bittorrent because I couldn't rent the original Alien film for less than $5 from any service. At the time it was a 34 year old movie that I rented from Blockbuster for $1 in the 90s.

It's sad that sometimes it's cheaper to buy the physical DVD used on eBay/Amazon, wait for it to get to you, watch it, and sell the physical DVD than it is to rent for 48 hours.

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