Got a TiVo at home. Having concluded a few months ago that Blockbuster blu-ray disc rental sucks, we’ve started watching movies that we download from Amazon. Typically the terms of rental require you to finish watching the movie within 24-48 hours of when you first start watching it.
Why do they do that? Why not, say, a week?
To make it hard for it to be watched twice.
Especially as the 2nd viewing may not even include YOU.
You are not buying a DVD of it.
That makes sense, but there’s also a 24-hour limit on the FREE video-on-demand from my cable tv provider. That means that if I watch half of it today and half tomorrow, they have to pay double, and they’re not getting anything at all extra from me.
This isn’t universally true of Amazon. When I rent episodes of “Jeeves and Wooster” I get them for a full month. Likely Isilder is correct and this is a yield management thing – recent movies will probably find many interested viewers over the space of a month and Amazon wants to make sure it gets its cut from each of them. Old TV shows are unlikely to be interesting to anyone other than the person who requested them, so they don’t loose much by being freer with the terms.