I wrote earlier about a frustration of mine with Amazon Unbox: movie rentals expire 24 hours from the moment you first start watching them. This caused me problems because I often split a movie into two parts, watching each after the kids go to bed – so around the same time every night.
Then, Apple announced deals with some studios to provide a similar rental-download service to the AppleTV units. But, again, the 24 hour limit was in place.
I thought that this limitation would soon be eased. I kept getting hints that these guys realized the problems with a 24 hour window. David Pogue wrote about it here and he usually gets pretty good coverage on his issues.
Well, it looks like DIRECTV is joining this group – and in an even more restrictive way. They recently announced changes to their PayPerView recording limits: “Effective April 15, the guidelines for DVR Pay-Per-View movie recordings will change. Customers will still be able to enjoy the convenience and variety of our PPV movie selection; however, they will only be available for viewing for 24 hours after the time of purchase.” So with DIRECTV, you get the same 24 hour window, but it starts at the time of purchase – not even at the time of initial viewing. Wow.
I really feel like this whole concept is moving in the wrong direction. I certainly like the idea of paying to rent individual content and downloading it to my living room (I prefer Amazon Unbox to PayPerView for a few reasons) but now with these restrictions, I’ve largely stopped. I envisioned myself starting again, with planning to watch movies all in one night, but I can’t make it happen. In the meantime, I just spent three nights watching “Babel” in pieces (with a DIRECTV crawl overlayed on my screen – at times over the subtitles – about upgrading to Showtime, which I already have – how annoying!). So, for now, I’m sticking with recording movies on my TiVo, for free, and watching them when I can. If these rental programs want my money, they’ll have to do better.