dallas moore

Watching Movies on the Cheap

I mostly don’t buy DVDs. Of the DVDs that I do own, I have a huge library of less than 12 titles. Of those, my entire viewing experience of them for the past six months has been the spine label on the shelf. I’m just not into watching a movie over and over again.

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good movie. It just means I don’t value owning a huge library … I don’t get a lot of replay value out of ownership. How do I get by?

First up, if a movie is so great that it is a “must see”, I’ll try to see it in an actual theater. If it slips by me, I’ll check it out for free at my public Library. Anything beyond that costs liquid cash and that’s when I become a cheapskate.

I tried Netflix for awhile, but I ran out of stuff I wanted. Also, they began gaming the system against me so that I wouldn’t get more than one movie a week. Bastards! If my Library doesn’t have a title, I’ll try to rent it from Redbox. Other than that, for renting the physical media, I’ll use local movie rental stores from time to time. In general though, I cringe at paying more than $1 on a rental. Again… I’m a cheapskate.

Barring that everything else is via legal online services. My experience with Netflix being soured to try them again for their online service (which is probably Windows only). I’ve finalized two pay rental sources that provide access in my household. Amazon Unbox via my Tivo and Apple iTunes.

Amazon Unbox lets me rent a movie via the through the Amazon website. One of the cool things I’ve noticed is that they’ll have periodically have special deals. Some hitting my magical price point of .99 cents. Hell, some free! So when Apple came around with rentals via iTunes, I was happy a similar special offer of .99 cents for a selected title each week. However…

iTunes does not facilitate easily finding this specially priced rental.

In fact, every time that I’ve gone searching for the specials through iTunes, I’ve received the results of nothing. Anywhere. Nada. Zip. How do you find the specials without hunting endlessly by looking at each movie in their still small inventory hoping to come across the deal? I’d figure they’d put it on the frontpage of the iTunes store. They didn’t when it was first released, they didn’t several weeks later. Maybe they have by now, but it is too late. I don’t care.

You see, some keen egg realized there were a lot of people with this frustration and made an utmost cleanly designed website that solves the problem. That website is 99rental.com. I set up their RSS feed to a bookmark in Firefox and when I think to look at it in the middle of the week, I can see what’s on special with iTunes.

Now if they’d only put something I want to watch on special … I’d be happier still.

Moral of the story is rather simple. Most of the movies I watch actually do come from my public Library. If they don’t have it, then I’ll rely on Redbox because of the price. If the title is even more obscure, I’ll break down and rent it from one of the two rental stores in the area.

Oddly though, if I have the time, I would still rather spend $6-12 bucks (depending on drive and if it is a matinée price) on seeing a movie in the actual theater.

Update: Just for clarity’s sake, I checked the iTunes Store’s movie area and they apparently did begin rotating their .99 rentals in a feature area at the top portion of the screen.  I still prefer 99rental.com though since the cover art, synopsis, additional info is all available via a web-browser … thus not having to load iTunes.