Why are online movie rentals so expensive?

[winb83]

It's about $5 to rent a movie online. At a local Redbox its $1.20 - $1.50 a day. It would seem to be cheaper for them to not have to physically maintain all these local machines and stock them with disc but they charge less for the rentals that way and more to stream them?

 

[Hersh]

pay for convenience

 

[HookersandIceCream]

Even online rentals are expensive
Movie companies refuse to let go of the older pay structure. There's a lot of money to still made also

The thing is netflix has spoiled people. It's not viable for companies to give out all their content for that cheap. Something's gotta give because netflixs model is not long term especially if they are going to do original content.

 

[winb83]

pay for convenience

They gain nothing by pushing me to go to the Redbox kiosk vs selling me that same rental online. There's a Redbox kiosk less than half a mile from my house. If the choices are pay $1.50 for a Blu-Ray or $5 online then I can get multiple Blu-Rays for the same price as one online rental so I'll do that.

 

[Hersh]

not everyone would

 

[Klyk21]

pay for convenience

Yep, conveneince fee is all. You don't leave your couch to rideout to local redbox,

 

[winb83]

not everyone would

Pretty sure more people use the kiosk than the streaming. Hell Blockbuster wasn't even that expensive and at $5 toss a few dollars more on there and you can Netflix one DVD a time for a month. It's a trash value to stream movies at that price and it has to cost them less to have people stream them.