Tuesday, January 16, 2024

You'd have to be a fool

I noticed as I was cueing up Fool's Paradise, my 157th 2023 movie with just about a week to go before I finalize, that Amazon Prime gives you three options of how to watch it.

One was to stream it for free as part of Prime. 

Then in a second tile, you could rent or buy it.

Only the rent option is truly ridiculous, and should be suppressed in some way when it's available to stream for free as part of your service. Both of them are just temporary access to the film, though one costs you $2.99 AUD while the other doesn't.

Purchasing it? You could, but I think many people are rightly hesitant to buy something where you essentially have visitation rights for the time it's streaming for free. Streaming arrangements are not indefinite, but you'd have to like the film an awful lot to buy the cow when the milk is free for the foreseeable future.

Clearly this is primarily due to an overlap that you don't see to the same degree in many other services. Prime functions as both a full streamer, in competition with the likes of Netflix, and as a full rental outlet, in competition with the likes of iTunes. Almost every title will come up on Prime as long as you can either rent or stream it somewhere, whereas the former doesn't come up on Netflix and the latter doesn't come up on iTunes/AppleTV+. (It occurs to me that AppleTV+ may have expanded its free movie options, though I tend to think of it more like a Disney+, offering its own content and not a lot else.)

But clearly there is some acknowledgement of either the streaming arrangement or the low quality of Fool's Paradise as a movie, because that $2.99 AUD is quite low for a movie that has only just recently become available for rental. To the extent that Charlie Day's film had a theatrical release, it was in May. The $2.99 price is even lower when you considered that this converts to closer to $2 in American dollars. And while iTunes has, or at least used to have, limited time pricing, such as its dearly departed, week-long 99 cent rentals of some new releases, I don't believe the same model exists on Amazon.

I don't know. Something to write about on a Tuesday. 

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