> So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon.
I did that too, and then went one step further, because some fifteen years down the line, online video rental still hilariously, bafflingly sucks.
Twelve, thirteen years ago I was still renting physical DVDs. Back then, renting a physical item that was produced halfway around the world, shipped to Germany and distributed by a company with hundreds of physical locations staffed by employees was around two and a half times cheaper than downloading a file via iTunes. Apart from inflation, those prices never came down.
Adding insult to injury, the more expensive download is almost always worse:
On the majority of DVDs I get both the original and the dubbed voice track, plus subtitles in English and German.
That's important to me, because my partner vastly prefers either the dubbed version, or at least the original with German subtitles. When I watch something for myself, I vastly prefer the original - sometimes with English subtitles.
In online video rental (or purchase), I can often only get the dubbed version. If the original is available at all, it is sometimes another item to be bought separately. Either case almost never features both German and English subtitles.
And as the icing on the cake, to this day not all product pages on iTunes even _list_ the featured languages of a download, let alone their subtitle languages.
Combine that with all the other indignities of buffet streaming, such as titles being constantly rotated out or the incessant advertising on Amazon before every episode.
So — I've gone back to buying used DVDs. And since they have their own problems such as unskippables and horrible menus, I'm currently looking into building a NAS and will be ripping them into a personal media collection sometime in the future.
And then I will have come back full circle to 2005.