Rental Agency

Does watching stuff have to be so exasperating?

1. Agony

The other night, Djuna and I watched Kindergarten Cop–the 1990, still-surprisingly-pretty-good Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. It’s available with a monthly subscription to AMC+ or to rent for $3.99. We don’t have AMC+, but we were generously offered a free trial, so for 10 minutes we carefully assessed whether we had the energy to navigate the various password managers and burner email accounts, if their content library was broadly enticing, if we’d remember to cancel before the trial ran out (we discussed a calendar event reminder). We went with the rental.

This agonizing, pre-movie ritual is a fixture of our lives these days. It is neither important nor high-stakes, but it must be navigated. And so, night after night, we pour justwatch.com, hold each other tight, and hope to make all the right-for-us decisions.

The repetition adds up to some real cumulative pain. Steve Levitt said that one of the best decisions he ever made was to stop worrying about things that cost less than $5. That’s probably good advice, but something about this subscription/rental dilemma situation bothers me. I wonder if there isn’t something to learn by getting to the bottom of it.

Here’s a question: what if you just rented everything?? No more stream-maxxing, just 100% rentals, all the time. Could it work? Would it actually be cheaper? Is it the way to a streaming promised land of sorts? Where convenience, access, and affordability flow like milk, and honey, and one other flowy thing?

2. The Money Part

The average digital movie rental costs between $4 and $6. TV shows go for $1-$3 per episode. Is that a lot? I’m not sure!

If you have any monthly streaming subscriptions, there’s some dollar amount you already agree to pay. That’s a good basis for comparison. Subscriptions are weird though. The actual value you get is partially derived from from how much you use them. You could pay $100 per month, watch zero hours of stuff, and not get any value at all. What we need is a cost-per-watch-hour that takes into account how much we pay and how much we watch.

Lucky for you, I have devised an elaborate calculator experience to help you find yours. Click your stuff below:

Americans, I am told, spend an average of $68 per month for streaming services and watch 1.5 hours a day. That’s about $1.50 per watch-hour. That means a 2-hour movie costs $3 in subscription costs. That’s $1 cheaper than renting! Good deal, America.

Our household pays a little less than average, but since we watch less, our cost-per-watch-hour is actually higher: $2.03, or $4ish for a 2-watch-hour movie. That’s close to break-even with renting. Your mileage may vary.

3. Walled Gardens

Ok forget the money. Wouldn’t renting be worth it anyway? For the FREEDOM OF IT? Unfortunately, there’s a rub: you can rent a lot of stuff, but you can’t rent everything:

Newer stuff: not as rentable. Anime: not as rentable. Don’t even get me started on how rentable documentaries are.

Some newer movies aren’t as availble because of the old-school, Hollywood release window playbook:

For as long as home movie watching has been a thing, this is how it’s been: distributors charge a premium to see a movie when it’s new and in high demand. If you’re willing to wait several hundred days, you can rent it for $4.

Increasingly though, as streaming platforms eat the movie business, this is happening:

Apple acquired CODA at the Sundance Film Festival and released it on Apple TV+ in 2021. The movie had a very short theatrical run, partly so it could qualify for an Oscar (it was the first streaming original film to win Best Picture). Then for 1,460 days, the only way to stream it was on Apple TV+.

Roma, which Netflix released in 2018, earned 10 Oscar nominations and followed a similar trajectory.

These are significant pieces of culture, and unless you are a cool kid with a dvd player, you need to pony up for a streaming subscription. So that kinda stinks…

Television can make you feel even more like you’re missing out–it’s much less available without subscriptions. This makes sense from a business perspective: a movie comes out once and is consumed in a 2-hour window, while a season of a hit show can trickle out over months. If Apple can get you hooked on a Ted Lasso or Ted Lasso Equivalent, you’re much more likely to hang around.

Also, there are no rules. HBO is keen on putting its stuff out more widely a year or so after release, and on prioritizing physical media releases. Respect.

4. Disappointment

At the end of the day, you want to watch the kinds of stuff you like to watch. So, if you went rentals-only, how often would you be let down?

This phase of the elaborate calculator experience attempts to quantify your potential disappointment by estimating how often something you want to watch is unavailable to rent.

Activate categories and toggle on and off different combinations of subscriptions to get a sense of how they affect your overall disappointment score.

You’ll notice certain subscriptions lower your overall score more than others. By definition, these subscriptions have more exclusive content to offer you. This demonstrates why exclusive content is so valuable to streamers: the more exclusive stuff a platform has on offer, the more it lowers disappointment, the more reason to stay subscribed.

You may have also noticed that it’s impossible to get your score to zero. This reflects movies and shows that are considered “popular” in the data but are actually unavailable to stream anywhere. Some level of disappointment is just a fact of life, I suppose.

5. Churn

Ok, so what’s the big deal? A few streaming-exlusive movies or television shows here or there never hurt anyone. Why should anyone care about this?

There’s nothing wrong with subscription-exclusive releases per se. But it does create an ecosystem that requires many subscriptions to watch things–which is annoying.

I both desire exclusive things and resent paying incrementally larger monthly fees to access them. I think this is partly why rentals appeal to me. They are a simpler exchange of value, free from nagging questions about getting your money’s worth.

I don’t think I’m alone in this frustration. Increasingly, viewers are cycling on and off services as they finish one thing and move on to the next. The industry term for this is “churn.” In a sense, it’s a way of judo-ing the subscription model into behaving like a simple, one-time transaction. Assuming you’re willing to manage the logistics, it’s an advantageous strategy. It provides low-disappointment access to multiple subscriptions while only paying for one or two at a time:

I’m no industry analyst, but if platforms have to compete for a smaller pool of monthly dollars, it’s easy to see how they could resist by employing dark cancellation patterns and password sharing crackdowns. We might also expect even tighter exclusivity in the form of fewer theatrical and physical releases, and less rental availability.

6. One Simple Trick

I think we’ve learned a lot here together–about the world, about ourselves. But let’s return to the original question: what if you just rented everything?

Renting-only could be financially advantageous, depending on your watch habits. But to go 100%, you’d have to give up at least some cultural participation. Churning offers a good balance of all worlds, but it’s a pain to manage.

There is one piece of this puzzle we haven’t touched on yet that can dramatically improve your movie and tv watching experience. It doesn’t cost anything and you have total control over it:

✨ Try like what you watch more. ✨

Djuna and I have a movie night system that helps us with this:

1. Every other movie night is your movie night.

2. When it’s your movie night, you propose 3 movies.

3. The other person picks one of those, and that’s what you watch.

4. That’s it.

It’s simple–but here’s why it’s great:

It’s a fun little game to curate your 3 movie options.

You can riff on a theme. When an actor is in the news for good or bad reasons, it’s nice to visit their filmography. If you’re not sure what the vibe is, it’s fun to pick 3 movies that are as different as possible. Shenanigans like choosing Robocop 1, 2 & 3 are technically allowed but introduce retaliation and game theory, which can be unwanted dynamics in your marriage.

You both technically choose something, so neither feels entirely uninvested, or like a hostage (unless you do the Robocop thing).

You naturally stop browsing streaming platforms for what to watch as much (which is an unbearable way to decide what to watch anyhow).

When we first implemented this system, newly tasked with generating movie options more frequently, we both spontaneously started keeping to-watch lists. That might sound overly effortful, but it’s actually just lazy and easier: you start noting things you want to watch as you go about your life. Movies and shows come up in conversation. You see a trailer for something that looks good. When it’s your turn to pick a movie, instead of scrolling around for 20 minutes on a streaming service and settling on something you half-watch, you consult your list and you’re ready to go. It’s a way of introducing agency into a situation that is otherwise largely out of your control.

Here’s something you immediatley notice: most movies, overwhelmingly, are not available on any monthly subscription plaftorm.

This is how you end up exasperatedly shopping for Kindergarten Cop at 9pm on a Thursday.

Maybe it’s the better deal regardless.

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Methodology

Streaming services and bundle prices were manually researched and are accurate as of 4-13-2026. Movie and tv release windows were also manually researched.

The movie and TV availability dataset was downloaded using TMDB’s API in April 2026. I requested 25 pages (20 items per page) for each content category, in descending popularity as determined by TMDB’s popularity algorithm. As each item was downloaded, the existing dataset was checked for title match to avoid duplication.

The disappointment index calculator filters the total corpus by active category and returns a percentage of items accessible either for free, on ad-supported platforms, to rent, or on any actively selected streaming service. One limitation of the data is that it doesn’t distinguish platform availability across different seasons of a TV series. Therefore, the calculator likely underestimates exclusivity for shows where the newest seasons are platform-exclusive, but older seasons are released more widely.

Movies available on subscription streaming is based on TMBD total number of movies on US subscription streaming (79,385) divided by total movies in the TMDB database (1,123,565).

This site was made with Svelte and Astro and was coded with generous help from gemini-3.1-pro. All words were written by me, your boi, Eric. Editing help by Djuna.

The TV vending machine illustration was created in Blender with assets from James Middleton, Desertsage, and hd poly.

Peep the source code here.