24 Hour Rental Period

[longhorn]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

I'm not sure what you mean. On movies I rented, I had the option to "hold on to it" for 30 days, and start the countdown when I start watching it (from that point, I need to finish it within 24-48h (depends on the studio)). Is this different from what you're asking?

-- Greg

I think he means hold on to the unwatched portion of the movie...e.g. if one watches the first half of a movie, the second half would remain active until it too was watched (but after 24 hrs you could not rewind to that first half)

Does Vudu have the ability to parse movies in this manner? (of course the studio negotiation challenges probably exceed any technical issues)

[TuffWoD]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

I'm not sure what you mean. On movies I rented, I had the option to "hold on to it" for 30 days, and start the countdown when I start watching it (from that point, I need to finish it within 24-48h (depends on the studio)). Is this different from what you're asking?

-- Greg

What I meant was it would be good for all movies to have a 48hr viewing period once started. I will watch 1/2 a movie one night and 1/2 the next night. With 24hrs I cannot do that. Video rental stores such as blockbuster rent DVD's for 48hrs why wont the studios allow vudu to do the same? I would also like them to lift the 30 day limit as well. Why does it matter to the studio when you start watching a movie. I believe I should be able to download it today and start my viewing period whenever I like even if it is 2 months later.

Overall I am very happy. These changes would just give me more freedom.

[Nded]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

What I meant was it would be good for all movies to have a 48hr viewing period once started. I will watch 1/2 a movie one night and 1/2 the next night. With 24hrs I cannot do that. Video rental stores such as blockbuster rent DVD's for 48hrs why wont the studios allow vudu to do the same? I would also like them to lift the 30 day limit as well. Why does it matter to the studio when you start watching a movie. I believe I should be able to download it today and start my viewing period whenever I like even if it is 2 months later.

Overall I am very happy. These changes would just give me more freedom.

I wish you owned a studio.

[Greg]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

What I meant was it would be good for all movies to have a 48hr viewing period once started. I will watch 1/2 a movie one night and 1/2 the next night. With 24hrs I cannot do that. Video rental stores such as blockbuster rent DVD's for 48hrs why wont the studios allow vudu to do the same? I would also like them to lift the 30 day limit as well. Why does it matter to the studio when you start watching a movie. I believe I should be able to download it today and start my viewing period whenever I like even if it is 2 months later.

Overall I am very happy. These changes would just give me more freedom.

Oh I see what you mean. 48h rental windows. As you can imagine, it's not the first time we hear this request in here .
I believe some independent studios offer a 48h window on the VUDU box.

Cheers,

-- Greg

[aaronwt]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

30 hours would make more sense. It's still short and maybe can satisfy the studio and for the consumer it's long enough to allow for 2 evenings to view it. You could start at 7PM one day and come back the next evening with plenty of time to finish watching. I would think that model might actually increase rentals some. Since a customer who might not have time to watch in one sitting can now watch in two. With a 24 hour rental in that situation they just won't rent it and it's lost revenue. I know for me with the Xbox Live service there have been rental I didn't make because I didn't have enough time to watch it in one sitting. But I guess all the downloads services are on even ground since they all have that 24 hour window. It just seems that a slightly longer rental window would actually increase sales.

[Rusdude]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

While I think that increasing the rental period or offering more flexibility is a high priority, I am not sure it's going to happen in the near future. Even Apple was unable to get more than 24-hour window even though it was, arguably, in a better position to negotiate with studios.

[RonV]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

While I think that increasing the rental period or offering more flexibility is a high priority, I am not sure it's going to happen in the near future. Even Apple was unable to get more than 24-hour window even though it was, arguably, in a better position to negotiate with studios.

Apple is getting the same terms that all VOD providers are getting. The content owners are in charge here and all the VOD providers have to play by their rules. Its been said many times by the content owners that they don't want to make Steve Jobs richer without themselves sharing in the rewards. So instead of giving Apple a monopoly on the content they are keeping the terms even and watching how the market shacks out.

[HeadHodge]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

Oh I see what you mean. 48h rental windows. As you can imagine, it's not the first time we hear this request in here .
I believe some independent studios offer a 48h window on the VUDU box.

Cheers,

-- Greg

I think somtimes we should review history instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Remember the good ole days when you went down to the local video store and rented a movie?

You would go there any time of the day they were open to rent a movie.

Then you would have to watch the movie and return it by the next day before they closed.

So to follow the same concept, you would rent the movie then have to watch it by (lets say) midnight the next day before it expired.

That way it eliminates the need for a specific number of hours before expiration. The duration would be from the time you rented the movie to midnight the next day.

The same concept could apply to multiple day rentals as well as possibly handling late return charges.

It's obvious to the most casual observer to me, but don't know if I explained it well enough for others to unterstand my meaning.

Regards

[aaronwt]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

Before the rental stores used that format they had a specific time. If it was 24 hours and you rented it at 5pm, you had to return it by 5PM the next day or incur another rental day.

[redwein]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

Before the rental stores used that format they had a specific time. If it was 24 hours and you rented it at 5pm, you had to return it by 5PM the next day or incur another rental day.

So we are already slightly ahead of the model they used in the early 1980's.

[Rusdude]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

Before the rental stores used that format they had a specific time. If it was 24 hours and you rented it at 5pm, you had to return it by 5PM the next day or incur another rental day.

What are these "rental stores" you speak of? You mean there were times when DVDs didn't magically appear in your mailbox in large red envelopes?

[longhorn]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

What are these "rental stores" you speak of? You mean there were times when DVDs didn't magically appear in your mailbox in large red envelopes?

What are these "large red envelopes" you speak of? You mean there was a time before you could just turn on the Vudu and play a movie?

[Rusdude]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

Getting back on topic, I read something interesting about Apple rentals last week (in comments on Giz or Engadget, I think). That person started watchin a movie (on an iPod, I believe), paused it and came back after the 24-hour period expired. However, he was given a choice to either go back to the main screen (and lose rental) or finish watching the movie.

Now, I don't know if that is an official feature and if it works on AppleTV, but if Apple got studios to agree to this, it'd be nice to have this added to Vudu.

[aaronwt]

Re: 24 Hour Rental Period

Getting back on topic, I read something interesting about Apple rentals last week (in comments on Giz or Engadget, I think). That person started watchin a movie (on an iPod, I believe), paused it and came back after the 24-hour period expired. However, he was given a choice to either go back to the main screen (and lose rental) or finish watching the movie.

Now, I don't know if that is an official feature and if it works on AppleTV, but if Apple got studios to agree to this, it'd be nice to have this added to Vudu.

That would certainly be a better option than having to pay again. Not as good as a 30 hour rental period but it would allow you to view on two evenings.

[glennvudu]

Re: More Competitive Pricing to Come?

We are using our vudu less and less - we got involved for the whole reason of convenience and the 24 hour rental period is most definitely affecting our decisions now.

We ran into this situation the other day where we actually waited 3 hours to rent the movie so that is was late enough in the weekday evening so if we couldn't finish it we would have enough time the next day to get through it. That isn't convenient - given that I could have run to Blockbuster picked up the blu-ray disc and had it for a couple of days - no problem - no hassle - no worries.

So to me here are my choices:

1) Find it on one of our movie channels and tivo it.
2) Check out if it available on Netflix just put it in the queue
3) Head down to Blockbuster to pick it up
4) See if it is on vudu

If vudu weren't more expensive than Blockbuster then that might make a difference...but really price wouldn't be an issue if they maximized the entire convenience factor around this entire concept. It would be great for someone to actually implement something around video and music the right way instead of all these insane practices - doesn't the movie industry understand ultimately long-term it is just hurting them.

The other feature vudu should offer is to be your "online" storage of your movies (i.e. disaster recovery for home theaters) and they could potentially sell subscriptions to entire movie libraries. We recently sold our daisy chained dvd players after we got to having 1200 dvd's in our system and maintaining, etc...it is really a big hassle and we hoping someday vudu + tivo will be a solid replacement, etc.

We still have high hopes for vudu and hope they get the viewing period figured out and soon - we want to use our vudu ALL the time.

...just my additional two cents...