Until this weekend I have never bought any music, or videos, or movies off of itunes; as a matter of fact I’ve never even visited the itunes store. However, due to a technological flaw, I discovered a brand new technological marvel!
For the past month I’ve been hearing unbelievable hype about the animated pixar movie Up! I was at Hannaford’s picking up a few things and I saw Up! gleaming in the Red Box movie rental case. It was absolute fate. I’ve never used a Red Box rental system before, and was quite intrigued and impressed with this relatively new way of renting movies. Either way, I was ecstatic that I was now in possession of the movie I’ve been dieing to watch. I ran home to my suite, assembled a fairly large group of anxious and excited viewers and popped in the DVD…it was finally time! Awful noises resembling a cat tumbling in a dryer emerged from our DVD player and after a minute of black screen text appeared on the screen informing us that there was an, “ERROR: Damaged Disc, CANNOT READ.”
I was crushed. We had all of these people over and my heart was set on seeing this movie; today, now. There was no way I was going to go back out, return the damaged DVD, and pick up another one, so I lost all hope and gave up.
My roomate, however, started plugging in his computer to the TV, switched to VGA mode, and said it will only be a minute. I had no idea what he was doing, thinking he might just show us some funny youtube clips or something else to ease the disappointment. Sure enough, in about 2 minutes UP! popped up on the TV in HD quality and in its entirety.
What used to take a trip to the movie store, an interaction with a clerk, and a working DVD player, my roomate was able to accomplish with the click of a button!!! He didn’t even have to type in a credit card number, he had a gift certificate loaded onto his account, so he literally clicked RENT and YES to confirm and we had the movie! Absolutely unbelievable. The convenience of this itunes renting feature is amazing, and I will utilize often…however, deep down I’m going to miss those trips to Blockbuster wandering around for 45 minutes fighting over which movie to get and inevitably ending up with one that half of us have already seen…on second thought, I’m over it! Click