Hacker News Reader

Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

In my country DVD rental is different set of laws and rules, and when you used to rent DVD, you did not need to go to Disney's DVD rental to rent Marvel movies, and to HBO's rental house to rent DC movies. Life was much simplier backdays. Of course now you don't even need to move a muscle, other than finger, to get new movie in 0 seconds, but also you need to pay monthly huge amount of money for the 3 movies you watch monthly, because you have have kids, work etc.

View on HN

Renting 3 movies a month on Amazon has no subscription fee and is at least as cheap as the old days of going to the local video store

Yeah I tire of this annoying nostalgia.

I remember how expensive it was to rent things from Videoland. I remember how expensive it was to buy box sets of TV shows at Free Record Shop. Trust me Netflix is still a million times better.

I remember my friends and I getting stoned in high school and renting every Disney cartoon feature film. Since they were old releases they cost us $1 each. I think we spent $13 in total. We spent more on the pot and candy.

My local store was £2.50 a night in the early 1990s. That’s £6 a night today. By the late 90s it was £3.50, about £7.50 a night today.

When were you in high school? Blockbuster cut prices near the end as it was dying to try to compete with Netflix and Redbox.

1995ish

Except that most stuff I’d want to watch isn’t available on $streaming_service, and often enough on none of them.

The rental fees, except some premium new rentals, are about the same as Blockbuster rentals. Cheaper if you account for inflation. No late fees, either, and no “We wanted to rent the latest Kevin Smith movie, but they were out of copies…”

I do miss the experience of browsing the aisles like a library. None of the streaming services have a good browsing interface. None.

What would a good browsing interface be like?

Ability to filter out already watched entries would be a massive improvement.

Not what Netflix has going on, that’s for sure. Lemme look by years, genres, ratings. Browse collections by actors, directors, studios - bonus points if I can look by things like “What movies/shows have both of these actors?”

Netflix’s interface used to be decent, but it has declined a lot.

That's a wonderful question I too wonder the answers for. It was fun to cruise around the isles and see what you could find to watch for the weekend vs your friend or partner and then get popcorn and other snacks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com