[Paperweight]

I used to help out a video rental store, which closed this month. I made them a mail-order rental catalogue (https://rent.leosvideos.ca/) and looked into this whole fiasco.

When you buy a DVD, you can rent it to others without a license. Physical ownership.

When you buy a digital file, you're not allowed to rent it out to others without a license. Digital non-ownership. But you have the bits - that's physical ownership.

People want "one place to rent movies" but that will never work. They'd be a middleman monopoly between you and the studios - and middleman monopolies always turn out bad.

In my opinion, there is a "free market" system that the invisible hand wants, which is a digital analogue of what we had with physical distribution, that reconciles the fact that a digital file really is a (virtual) physical object (on a hard drive), and nothing else will work:

You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

Result: There would be multiple online streaming rental stores that have huge catalogues of whatever you want.

Speculation: Everyone would just use those. Studios would raise the prices for digital files to $10k+ because they know it will be rented out. The total sales of units would amount to the high water mark of the number of people who want to watch a file at the same time.

We'd have a rich market where there are multiple players in each layer.

[diegoperini]

> You can rent your own digital files to one person at a time via streaming.

This can never happen but only simulated, up to a point. Copying physical objects requires manufacture work, copying data is essentially free if you neglect the transmission costs. Whatever paradigm digital ownership adopts will not resemble the physical world renting mechanism.

I used your sentence as a straw-man, please forgive me. :)

[Paperweight]

I'd say the unit cost of running a proper streaming-rental service is about the same as burning a copy of a DVD (20 cents per movie). There's way more to it than just bandwidth.

Sure you could still pirate (just like you could copy DVDs) but if the path of least resistance (factoring in quality, legal and moral costs) is to just rent it legitimately then that's what people would do. Video stores could have just copied DVDs and the studios were very afraid of DVD-Rs when they came out, but that didn't pan out because it's obviously illegal and immoral.

There was a company in California in the early days that had actual people putting actual DVDs into actual DVD players that would stream on demand across the internet, but they folded when they got a legal threat. It might be legally OK - I don't think it's ever been tested in court.