When we first moved to our rural area here the high speed wireless situation was atrocious and we found that because of that the local gas station & convenience stores still had a pretty active business renting DVD/BluRay movies. Until we could finally get decent high speed Internet without caps, we did that (and bought BluRay discs as well) which was only about 5, 6 years ago.
There was something quite nice and nostalgic about it.
- blu ray rentals were 99¢ / wk
- a vast trove of content
- no lock-in or monthly fees
sure, you actually have to make it to the store... but, 2007 never looked better.
now, Netflix was distributing by mail, and i think the promise was for them to stream all their content into homes. but, then it got messy.
but yeah, for 99¢ / movie, I'm happy to pay. i'll even occasionally pay to rent through AppleTV.