larsoncc

"I've never heard of anyone sharing a movie rental though." You're kidding, right? You've never watched your movies at someone else's house? You've never lent someone a tape? The TV shows are OWNERSHIP, by the way.

I could bring the whole 360 over, eh? Well, that's not a complete pain in the ass, now is it? Or I could let them have access to my account for a day at a time while the content downloads - and not play games on my machine in the mean time. There's security and convenience.

"no one likes to be restricted to viewing a movie on their computer monitor" - the computer is the most flexible place for your content - I'd never argue otherwise. Further, it's damn easy to watch computer content on a TV or HDTV.

mprobins - yeah, and 25 years ago, I didn't have an iPod - but it was easy to take content to all of the devices that I DID have. It was more portable than it is now. The old formats allowed sharing with friends or copying to your own devices (with minor signal degradation... not losing 5/6th of the picture information!). At the time, the best quality was standard definition. Try to take your HD recordings with you... Lack of portability, interoperability, and archiving are leading complaints of HDTV owners (check out the AVS Forums).

Maybe this service will address some of these issues, but that certainly wasn't announced.

Great, another device that doesn't work with anything ELSE I have. Welcome to the "wonderful" world of broken HDTV.

So, I buy the content on 360. But then I can't record it in HD to anywhere else. I can't take it with me on my iPod Video, unless I rerecord it in standard def, re encode, etc etc. I can't go to my brother's house and show him the movie I rented.

**Oh, and I can't even watch it on my computer.**

Hey look - we solved these problems like, 25 years ago with VHS. As a consumer, I'm not asking for a lot - I just want the content, and I want it transparent on all my devices.

MAYBE I'll get some of this content when those issues are solved.