Yesterday I noticed a few surprising titles in my cousin Josh‘s movie collection. When I asked, he explained for those titles a purchase was just a few dollars more, so why not just buy?

A good point, and one Lieberfarb would agree with. But Josh did have one beef with buying over renting: as a man who owns hundreds of CDs, he’s tired of all the silver discs he has to manage. Yet you only get the ability to control your viewing with ownership. (Does anyone believe video-on-demand, which otherwise sounds like the perfect solution to this problem, won’t eventually denigrate into pay to play — each time, every time?)

The solution seems to be a home entertainment server, tucked somewhere out of sight. Copy all your discs to this central machine, and then put them in storage. Pioneer seems to be working on this very product.

Of course, some hairy copyright issues are raised. But that’s for another post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 28th, 2002 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Film, Geekery.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.