My wife and I are no strangers to "buying" on-demand movies we enjoy. But our experience with Verizon FIOS is that every couple of months those titles "aren't available." Our "Purchased" area is empty.

Last night was one of those nights. We settled in a bit early for TV (minor celebration) and decided we had time to re-watch a movie, and our kid-still-at-home would join us. But we couldn't get it and ended up watching some junk (background while we talked mainly) and, of course, losing the kid's interest.

The alternative was to try to call CS and spend perhaps an hour troubleshooting.

If, however, we owned our own physical copy we could have watched it.

My evening, crippled by tech failures of the vendor, and no recourse for compensation for loss of use or our time.

Have you tried Movies Anywhere? It syncs your purchased Movies between most major providers. I wonder if this would allow you to watch the movie elsewhere when this issue occurs at one vendor. With this I now have many of my Apple purchases on Google Play and Amazon and vice versa

Thanks- I'll look into it.

>I still think DRM should be banned and paying for content should be super cheap - say per movie $1 for HD file download and $2 for a 4k version

Sounds like you need to go and produce some content and distribute it this way to show the world the way to englightenment. Please come back and post a Show HN on how well it worked out for you.

I do have sympathy with this view (that content creators can do as they like, of course!), but I’m just saying I want to be able to buy films (maybe > 5 years old), for very cheap, legally, in a format I own, that I can watch when I like on any device I choose. I think a lot of people would like this possibility too and would spend lots of money that they wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s difficult to prove either way of course without a spare content library. I’ve no interest in starting to charge for content, all the films I make will always be free. :-D

I think the problem is that you're pitching the value too low.

It's like...$1 for a DRM-free song right now, and tbh that's not unfair.

Even if I could buy movies DRM-free right now for $10, older movies for $5, that'd be fair; I think. :)

I’m saying the low price would make more money for the studios because it being cheap more people would buy 10x or more of the digital item.

$5 for a movie is still cheap. :)

>The funniest thing of course is I bet the studios would make more money than trying to charge me $4.99 to rent movies and absurd sums to "buy" them...

That was actually the situation early on with videotape. The price of the tapes was set at something like $100 to make more money (indirectly) by renting because the rental stores had to pay a much higher price.

Over time, tapes started also being "priced to buy" (often things like Disney animation that kids would want to watch over and over again). Eventually, I think pretty much everything became priced to buy.

Right on. In the times of DVDs, you could get a DVD film for $5 dollars and here in Mexico even cheaper $50 pesos ($2.5 USD). I think the fact that a rental movie (even when you "buy" the digital version it is a rental as it has ben shown over an over) costs around $12 USD today that delivery process has been streamlined so much. That's pure greed.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if reducing the price of a blockbuster flick by 50% only increased it's audience by 10%.

$5 to rent a movie seems a bargain compared with times past.

But also in times past you had to have physical infrastructure in ever town to rent movies...