“Back in September Apple made a welcome improvement to iTunes by automatically upgrading, at no cost, its customers’ already-purchased movies to 4K resolution,” Khoi Vinh writes for Subtraction.com. “This was laudably customer-friendly but I also found it to be a savvy move in that it underscores the value of owning media.”
“At a minimum, the ownership of films allowed under the current model preserves a meaningfulness that has largely disappeared from music. I rarely buy albums anymore because I can listen to nearly anything I want at any time I want,” Vinh writes. “That’s a tremendous luxury but the flip side is that I don’t care about music nearly as much anymore, and I don’t really feel like any of it is ‘mine.'”
“By contrast, I do feel a certain pride of ownership over the movies in my collection, whether they’re digital or on physical media. These are movies that I’ve selected to be part of my own personal archive, that I plan to return to again and again,” Vinh writes. “To that point, it occurs to me that Apple could go even further in emphasizing the value of ownership by helping their customers convert rentals to purchases. If you rent a movie on iTunes, Apple should offer to let you pay the difference between the rental price and the purchase price to actually own it. To keep this reasonable, this offer could be limited to the rental period, which Apple also increased to forty-eight hours back in September. ”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Music is listened to over and over. Movies are different and they are naturally consumed differently than music. The movies we’d want to rewatch over and over again number in the single digits.
Furthermore, if you find yourself watching run-of-the-mill movies and/or episodes of TV shows over and over, you’re either under the age of four or in need of professional help.
That said, it’s certainly reasonable to suggest that on the rare occasion when you happen to rent a Citizen Kane, you should be able to apply the rental fee towards the full purchase price.
