Thursday, July 24, 2008

Online movie rental in Germany: How hard can it be?

We all know that: You are sitting at home Sunday night. There is nothing interesting on TV and also your DVD collection is not appealing that day. But hey, this is the Internet age, so why not just rent a movie online and watch it. That's convenient and just perfect. So I checked out the services available in Germany and the situation sucks:

I am running a Mac (so I am not even ranting about that no one will support my Linux laptop), so I first tried iTunes. They do not rent/sell movies in iTunes in Germany. How lame is this? There are at least two other big stores online, but they require Windows Media Player, thus only sell to Windows users.

So my only way out is to go the illegal way and use a filesharing system? This just cannot be true. I am willing to pay some Euros to see a nice movie on demand, I am even willing to bear with stupid DRM. But they will not let me, so what can you do...?