Maybe this is a good size challenge for people who are like 10-15 years younger than I myself am, but, really, --- Do you Remember the days when you had a choice between Blockbuster Video and your LOCAL video store? We don't have that anymore, at least not as far as video (movie&TV,etc.) rentals go. In various pockets of the USA, there's still local video stores where you can BUY movies (usually they're multi-media stores with both movies & music and sometimes books as well). These stores are not warehouses where people are doing literally nothing all day except picking up boxes and grabbing stuff off shelves. These are not retail factories. They are places where if you want it, you come to get it, and both you and the employee can enjoy the presence of all kinds of music and other popular forms of art and, if and when you decide to do so, you can even have a conversation with the store clerk, just so long as it doesn't encroach on their ability to service other customers. You can extend kindness and joy to them by your human presence. The employees are not limited to the management style choice of their supervisor, who has the capacity to be kind and encouraging OR discouraging and condescending. With real live customer influx, jerks may come and spoil things sometimes, but the employees are not stuck with that through the entire day or the entire week or however long that person decides to stick around. The customer has no reason to stick around for more than a few hours (if that long even). A manager/supervisor/? is going to stick around until they find a better job or they get fired. Either of those exit strategies could take YEARS to end. So you as an employee of Amazon or MovieMars, you wake up, you go to work, you're bored out of your mind and your boss is either OK of he's not.
Now, I don't know what the job life of an employee for a streaming movie company is like. I just don't. What i do know is none of the streaming movie companies NEED to exist. Amazon got their fame by taking human interaction out of retail. RedBox got their fame by replacing Blockbuster as a way to rent movies. Google got their start as a search engine. Fandango got their start by selling movie tickets on the internet. These people could have done without movie streaming. You'll notice that NOBODY who streams movie on the internet started out as an internet based movie startup. So IF anyone simply wanted to venture into streaming movies on the internet as a means of liveleyhood, they either have a ton of competition already in place and will have difficulty building a customer base and they probably won't make it. Actually, come to think of it, I think a company has emerged as its own force in the movie streaming biz. ROW8. If I did not own a Roku, I don't think I'd have ever heard of them. Maybe everyone else also owns a Roku or similar device. It wouldn't terribly surprise me. Maybe ROW8 is doing just fine in holding their own. I don't have any real reason to doubt it. But if someone else wanted to do what ROW8 is doing, then what are the odds of success for this 2nd independent company thriving? They either have an ingenious marketing strategy up their sleeves that will sink ROW8 or they don't know what they're doing and they themselves will sink.
Financially, I prefer movie streaming. For $15/mo you can get AT LEAST 6 movies a month. You can either take 2 movies and spend the entire month watching them or you can quickly go "done" and send them back and get more and if you do it that way, you can easily get as many as 10 movies in one month. I understand not everyone has 10 movies they want to watch. If you just want a couple movies, you can pay $6 + tax. If the two movies you end up with are priced at $2.99 on Amazon or wherever, then obviously you're overspending by a penny + the tax, but most movies to stream on the internet are anywhere from $3.99 to $5.99, depending on how recent they are. I personally benefit from disc using because I don't usually just sit and watch a movie. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes I'll start watching a movie and then finish it later. With a streaming rental, you can't do that. If you start it and get interrupted by your bladder and you come right back to the movie, then OK, but if you just need to take a break so you can do epteen other tasks and it takes a day or two to get back to watching the movie, then you might have to re-rent it. I realize not everyone has that particular matter to consider.
But here's another thing; the manufacturing of the discs also provides a job for someone to do. Not as gratifying of a job as retail, but unfortunately not all jobs are going to be gratifying. Some of them just plain suck(!). But it would be helpful overrall to consider; is the $5 you save on buying the newest DVD on Amazon worth forcing someone out of a job that they enjoy? I'm not just talking about one person with one job that you'd kill to have. I'm talking about hundreds of people, maybe even thousands of thousands. You can't take the blame for closed doors. But you don't have to give in to behaving like you don't care.
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