Back in Random Factoid #257, I wrote that “I have a nasty habit of letting my iTunes rentals sit for almost all of their 30 day rental periods. Then, I scramble to watch them before they expire – which is not a fun way to watch a movie.”
The whole 24-hour watching period is a pain in the butt and always feels like significantly less than the day that it is. Subtract sleep from the equation and you are looking at about 16-17 actual viewing hours. Then no one actually has nothing to do for 16 hours, and it’s really hard to find 2 hours of those to sit down and watch without having to worry.
So when I opened my AT&T U-Verse UGuide this week and saw that they were offering a 3-day rental for “Toy Story 3,” I couldn’t help but wonder why all streaming/online rentals can’t have a longer watching period? Sometimes it’s hard to start a movie and then finish it within 24 hours – life happens. I can count multiple times that I haven’t finished a movie I started watching on iTunes; so many instances, in fact, that I generally don’t let myself watch an iTunes rental past 8:30 P.M.
My modest proposal (tastier than a baby) would be this: at least a 2 day watching period for rented movies. I can live with 36 hours, too.
Tonight, I sat down to watch “Rocket Science,” the movie which led Jason Reitman to write the part of Natalie Keener in “Up in the Air” specifically for Anna Kendrick, on my AT&T U-Verse DVR. After a minute, it stopped. Turns out that at 3:50 A.M. a few days ago, we ran out of space on the DVR. This is especially frustrating because “Rocket Science” is nearly impossible to find, and I managed to find the one time that it would be on Cinemax for weeks.
Marshall and the Movies 
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