Like many of you, I used to love renting VHS tapes and later DVDs from brick-and-mortar stores. Not only was it a fun experience and way to meet new people, there often was no other way to see the movies you wanted.
These days there are plenty of options to see the movies you want, and digital rental is by far the worst one of the bunch.
The “cheap” rental trap is sneakily draining your wallet
It’s literally nickle-and-diming you
This thought occurred to me recently when my wife rented Nacho Libre for the second time, at which point we might as well have paid the full price to “own” the movie on Apple TV. This is one of the pitfalls of online rentals. The price of the rental is usually quite a bit lower than purchasing indefinite access to it, but it doesn’t actually take that many rentals to spend the same amount of money and still not have the movie.
Honestly, in a perfect world, if you’d rented the same movie enough times, it should have just converted to a proper purchase, but this world is anything but perfect, and I feel stupid for throwing even a single dollar at these rental services.
You’re paying for nothing—and getting less than ever
It’s funny, but digital rentals are such a downgrade over physical rentals that I can’t help but let out an exasperated chuckle as I write this while shaking my head. For example, if you rented a DVD back in the day, it would have special features on it. That’s something you don’t get with most digital rentals but do get with the purchase.
With physical rentals, you could easily share the disc or tape with friends and family before returning it, and your rental and viewing periods were the same thing. None of this “30 days to start watching” and then 48 hours from when you first click play to finish.
A digital rental is so devalued in comparison to what we used to have that $2 seems like a rip-off when you think about it. That’s before we even get to how much worse the video quality is than DVD or Blu-ray, but that’s another conversation.
You probably already pay for better options
What are all those subscriptions for?
Before you rent a movie, especially an older one, you should check whether it’s not already on one of the streaming services you pay for. Even if it’s not on a service you already pay for, it might be cheaper to pay for a month’s access to that service rather than rent just the one movie.
Personally, I find that Plex is the best way to find movie streaming locations. It knows where things are streaming in your location, so it just takes a few seconds to check and maybe save some hard-earned money.
But your other sensible weapon is simple patience. In the old days, it used to be that movies would have their run in the theaters, and then rental companies would have a few months of exclusivity after which they would go on TV and be available for purchase on home media.
That timeline has now been heavily compressed. Movies become available to rent digitally shortly after the theatrical run and then move fairly swiftly to streaming services. So if you’re willing to wait a month or two, you can just watch the movie when it comes to the services you already pay for.
Stop renting—start building something that’s actually yours
There’s nothing like a tangible movie
While I don’t like the idea of “buying” a digital movie that can be revoked at any time, if there’s even a chance that you’ll want to watch a film a second time, it makes more sense to just spend a little extra and buy it.
What makes even more sense is to buy the physical version of that movie, assuming it gets a physical release. Buying the 4K Blu-ray of a modern new release is how you get the definitive, highest-quality version of that movie. It’s a higher upfront cost, but if you take care of that disc, you have unfettered access for the rest of your life.
When it comes to older movies, I’ve been buying used DVDs and Blu-rays of movies that are important to me by the bucket load. No really, some used DVD vendors sell them by weight!
I’ve now built up a curated collection of discs that number in the hundreds, and I’m not stopping any time soon. If you’re just casual about your movies and want to watch them once as soon as possible, then maybe a digital rental is both the most cost-effective and convenient way to do it. However, if you care just even a tiny little bit about movies and getting your money’s worth, you’ll avoid digital rentals like the plague.