Evolution of Movie Rental iPhone apps

Won’t it be nice to sit with a cup of coffee, at the airport with your iPhone, and rent an old classic movie right before boarding the plane, or on a super boring road trip?

In 1997, Netflix came up with a way where people could rent movies online and receive them by post. That was the end of Blockbuster and Hollywood video stores. Blockbuster and Hollywood stores accepted the defeat, and slowly, brick-and-mortar stores started closing down. But, world changes rapidly, and while people were busy renting movies via Netflix, something hit them hard.

Piracy arrived in its full swing. Internet gurus used their expertise & genius to rip copies of DVDs and distribute them via P2P sharing. The industry started feeling the impact much later.

Luckily, movie rental companies realized that the popularity of pirated video or audio is based on two facts: 1). A lot of people- even the conscientious citizens- do not feel guilty about committing a cyber crime and practically using a stolen commodity, 2). People hate waiting for anything.

Although, they knew that they couldn’t really do much about the first aspect, they did something to cater to the second demand- they made video content available online for rent. And so began the trend of online rental movie services where people can now buy memberships online, and watch a movie online instantly (if the movie is available). Hopefully, it’s slowly catching up.

To continue the story, we have heard about the ever so elusive “DashBuster movie rental app” (that cannot be found in the App store easily) for iPhones. Since video streaming has started on iPhones, a movie rental iPhone app would be the coolest idea since canned beers. It doesn’t just cater to the availability factor, but also addresses the anywhere, anytime factor as well.