Improving The Customer Experience Of Film Rental Expiration

As a child of the 80’s I used to enjoy heading down to the local independent video rental shop to marvel at the latest releases and video games. Video shops were fun to be in, and I used to enjoy picking up and reading the VHS boxes and browsing the curiosities in the bargain bins. After pondering which film to spend my hard earned pocket money on, I would get out the laminated membership card and pay for the transaction in cash.

The rules were pretty clear, you paid a price per night e.g. £2, or a combined weekend price of £3.75. If you were late you paid late fees that added up each day. The fees were based on what the shop would have made from renting out the film or game to someone else and also factoring in the price to purchase films from the limited range of suppliers they had to buy from (this was before Amazon, Netflix, Play.com etc.).

This was a concept I understood e.g. if you were late you needed to pay up. Whilst no-one likes paying fines, for paying for an item that you had held onto, that no-one else could rent out as a result made sense.

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Where is it currently going wrong?

I recently enjoyed a rare lazy weekend and rented several films through iTunes including the 2013 film ‘Her’ by Spike Jonze, which I highly recommend.

I managed to watch most of ‘Her’ but had to pause it and didn’t pick it up again until almost two days later. For those not familiar with how renting films on iTunes works, you have 30 days to start watching a film after you rent it. When you start watching the film you have 24 hours (in the US) or 48 hours (elsewhere) to finish it. You can watch the film as much as you want until it expires. I did not see that I only had 30 minutes left of the rental period to watch the film before it expired, yet I had 50 minutes of the actual film left to watch.

In what can only be described as an abrupt halt, the rental of the film expired and the screen of iTunes (and momentarily my laptop) went completely black. The film had expired and I was left having no idea what happened towards the end of the film.