Originally published on LinkedIn in 2022.

One Friday night, husband and I rented a movie on Amazon. After wasting 30 minutes watching trailers, rejecting recommendations from smart-but-not-really algorithms (and of course, flipping the coin about who gets to pick), we agreed that only The Disaster Artist fit our “vibe” in that moment, for whatever reason. The only place it was available was Amazon. The catch? The movie wasn’t bundled into our Prime subscription. It was available on rent.

It feels bizarre to rent a movie in 2022.

For one, we are all already spending a lot of money on entertainment. There are hundreds of thousands of movies and shows available across all our OTT subscriptions, plus countless more on Youtube for free. Paying extra to watch ONE specific movie that we chanced upon on certainly doesn’t make financial sense. But then again, entertainment rarely does. It’s about the vibes, the feelz, the experience, often to the point of being irrational.

Secondly, it feels like we are coming full circle. There was a time when we thought subscriptions had disrupted the DVD rental model for good. Why would viewers want to go back to buying or renting a DVDs, when they could pay one fee for bucketloads of high-quality cinema, available in the comforts of their own living rooms? Yet here we are again, renting and purchasing individual digital movies, their digital versions instead of the DVDs.

If this ends up being the start of a new trend — digital content rental/buy models — it will be, on one hand, somewhat understandable from a business standpoint. The subscription economy is getting bloated. Consumers are constantly calculating which subscriptions to keep or cancel, updating their decisions frequently based on shifting preferences, prices, and trends. As a result, entertainment companies are competing not only with one another but with adjacent industries — education, gaming, linear TV, literally anything else which offers content… or more broadly, entertainment.

On the other hand, as a consumer, Amazon’s movie-rental model did feel like a bit of a betrayal. Wasn’t Prime supposed to be the only subscription I would ever need from Amazon? Wasn’t that the original promise? How can I trust that they won’t move every movie or show that is worth watching out of Prime and into the rental category? (The Disaster Artist did turn out to be significantly better entertainment than anything we had recently seen via our subscriptions.)

Subscriptions and Rentals are inherently conflicting business models, especially in digital content. Of course, they wouldn’t be if they catered to separate, mutually-exclusive audiences — that is, if there were a clear division between subscription-preferring viewers and rental-preferring ones. But how likely is it that such a clean-cut exists? People aren’t loyal to business models, after all, they are loyal to good entertainment.

I am reminded of an old case study where HP intentionally fuelled competition between their Inkjet and Laser printer divisions. Last I read, it worked out great for HP, and they eventually dominated both markets. But of course, movies are no printers. Digital is no hardware. Can rentals and subscriptions coexist in the world of digital entertainment? It will be interesting to see. As a viewer, all I really want is good entertainment—and, of course, more than my money’s worth.

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