I was looking through the PS3 Video Store over the weekend in hopes to rent a movie instead of driving out to BlockBuster. Specifically, I wanted to rent 21. I knew it was on the store, so it didn’t take long to find it. To my astonishment, it’s not available as a rental. You can only purchase the movie for $14.99. Wait, what?
If a movie is on the store for purchase, there’s no reason whatsoever to exclude a rental option. Having the ability to buy the movie is cool, but every single movie on the Video Store should be available to ren. I’d never seen 21 and wasn’t about to shell out $15 just to watch it once.
I know the Video Store is in its infancy and Sony will be expanding things as time goes on, but this one just seems pretty obvious. If there was a rental option for 21, I would have grabbed it. Since there wasn’t, my money went elsewhere (namely my local BlockBuster for the Blu-Ray rental). Hopefully Sony addresses this sooner than later if they want to make more money from the Video Store.
16 Comments
Write a Comment»My local blockbuster is 5 minutes away, and I have a blockbuster online account, so I trade in my mail-ins at the store for free rentals. I don’t see myself ever using the download service, even though blockbuster online just rolled that out too.
If it’s the same price, I’d rather not drive to get the movie. Hopefully Sony can work it out and get rental options for all the movies on the Video Store
It could just be a marketing test. Put some movies up for $15… others for $10… let you rent some and not rent others. Make some rent-only, make others buy-only. Make some available in HD and others only in SD. By putting up this type of variety, they can see which methods will maximize profits and drive highest adoption rates.
I think Sony is just testing the waters. I see prices and service options changing often until they find what works.
Be glad it wasn’t available for rental. The first and only time I tried out the Rental store was Beowulf. It took about a day for the movie to finish (at least) downloading.
I use netflix for blu titles and only rent movies digitally on my iphone when traveling. Until the standard for digital releases is 1080p, I will not have an interest for home rentals.
Until internet speeds get much faster and standard hard drive sizes in all home theater devices get much much bigger, don’t expect to see any downloadable 1080p movies. The file sizes would be HUGE even compared to the 720p downloads we get now.
@Dan You’re complaining about the download speed? You should ask for a refund because Beowulf sucked 10 types of ass.
If your download took a day you got some slow ass internet.
@Dan - I’ve rented HD movies from both the 360 and PS3 video stores and both seem to download at a good pace. I’m not sure exact timing, but when I watched the progress and checked the router logs, things were going at close to my connection cap of 10mbps.
I am glad someone wrote an article on this. The rentals are a little light. I can not see anyone paying $15 bucks or more for a movie to own to just play on the PS3 and psp. - It has to be a really awesome movie. But then again, I believe people would buy it on blu ray if they want to own.
I believe if they lowered the price of movie rentals to $1.99, then a whole lot more people would use the service.
Stop charging a premium for for HD content.
Regarding competition in tough times…I think of the airline line industry and Southwest Airlines. They catered to low prices getting more consumers. The other airlines that did not…just simply suffered.
Sony should be able to do anything MS can do, and since Sony is always late, they should do it even better, and MS launched their movie service with the ability to download rentals and keepers all at the same time, so why the eff can’t Sony do the same, why does Sony always havce to suck at what they do for a year or so before they get it right?
@JACKSON
Dude, WTF are you talking about SONY is kicking the Sh1t out of M$!
@GAME-HERO
If anything, SONY is tied up with Microsoft.
I am not a Xbox fanboy btw. I only own the Wii and PlayStation 3. ;D
You mean Sony added, a year later, a feature another console had, but made it suck? NO. You have got to be kidding! I couldn’t see that coming.
What the hell do you expect? It’s Sony. This is their M.O. Home will be out a year ago, and their free online will kick Live’s ass. Yea O.K. Just keep waiting. Eventually the PS3 won’t suck. Trust me. Any year now.
I kinda have to agree with Stareclips but at the same time they could make every movie have the option of rental and purchase in both SD & HD and still get all the info on what they need for marketing, but they haven’t and I kinda think this has something also to do with the Movie Studios, I think the studios are telling Sony what options to give to the consumer.
The one thing I think a lot of people haven’t noticed is Sony also said that they would allow you to get a preview of every video in the store but the only one available is the one they demoed when the store first came out.
Another thing is when it comes to TV shows not all TV shows have the complete seasons ready for download even though they have them on DVD like 2 years ago. Also not all TV shows that have the complete season allow you a download all option with a discount, they only have a buy every episode seperatly option and so at that point it costs you even more then if you would buy the entire season on DVD.
My biggest problem with the video store is just with the TOS. It states that if you buy & download any video and it gets deleted from your Hardrive for whatever reason weather it is because your HD fails or get corrupted or even if you upgrade your HD and you don’t remember to back-up your movies that you will not be able to re-download the movie for any reason what so ever. That will keep me away from their video store for as long as that is a standard. I will stick with Physical Media. Thank You Very Much
There are some definint kinks that need to be worked out with the video store and most of them are pretty obvious. So lets hope Sony can work them out soon.