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[Margit Szermer]

I just went through this last night. I had tagged half a dozen movies to watch, but when I went to watch them, none of them would play. When I click "HOW TO WATCH" it says you can buy, rent, or subscribe. I do subscribe, so what's the problem?

I subscribed to Apple TV because I wanted to finish watching the The Expanse. Like most of you I found out that post season 2, they're going to charge me $2.33 for each episode. In the 90's I was an enthusiastic Apple guy. Not any more. Apple's got a rotten core now.

As an avid iOS user. The pricing model for Apple TV is the worse of its kind. There is no value for money in subscription to this. Will in the future advise all and anyone from being ripped off. Rather spend your hard earned dollar on Netflix or prime. Period.

This is complete BS. It is not OK to charge a lot of money for a subscription and then to charge huge sums in addition to that for your content. I know you are trying to justify this but it does not wash.

There is no double charging. The Apple TV app hosts more content than just the Apple TV+ subscription catalog. The subscription is not for the app (the app itself is free), but for access to the Apple Originals a.k.a Apple TV+ catalog. Buying or renting movies or TV shows is separate from the subscription. One does not require the other. See Apple TV+ as an in-app subscription channel.

The subscription is only for "Apple TV +" content except when Apple offers subscribers limited-time to watch movies that are normally not part of the subscription. Such as the 50 limited-time to watch movies that are available now for March & April 2024

Your Apple TV subscription only includes original Apple content. That's it. Nothing else. If you want content that comes from some other outlet, you need to buy it. It's just like if you subscribe to the New York Times, you don't get the books from the New York Times Bestseller list for free.

I have used Prime, Paramount+, Hulu and so far Apple TV+ offers far better quality content than any of those other services. I don't consider old TV shows found on those other apps a reason to pay more for a service just to claim they have more content.

You are given a free trial when you sign up to Apple TV+ for the first time to give you the opportunity to see if you like the content and if you don't, then just cancel and move on with your day. It's not that difficult and everyone is perfectly capable of deciding for themselves.

Videoport, of Portland, Maine, lasted longer than most. It was better than most. It owed its longevity to a single, engaged owner, to strong ties to the local film scene and a collection that put others to shame. I was proud to work there, alongside a staff that paired film knowledge and exceptional customer service skills like few other places I've known. We were a fixture in town, until we weren't.

It hasn't been so long since independent rental joints had the opposite problem. Before Videoport, I spent 10 years working at Matt & Dave's Video Venture. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that our downfall came at the hands of a buyout by a major rental chain. Suspiciously well-dressed guys with clipboards started dropping in; soon enough, we were gone, one of the estimated 30,000 video stores in America gobbled up by Blockbuster or Movie Gallery or Hollywood Video, each eager to dominate the booming VHS rental racket. If only those chains knew that within a decade, they'd be goners too.

I spent 25 years of my life in an industry that no longer exists. Maybe I'm not the most ambitious guy. But that time has provided me with an up-close look at not just how the industry is changing but how people's tastes, and the culture those tastes create, have changed with it.

That was flattering and sad, and ultimately all we could do was agree: Yeah, we wouldn't be there. There were tears and gifts and genuine concern (not unfounded) about what my coworkers and I would do to survive, a phenomenon both touching and illustrative of how identified we were with the role we played in their lives. A great video store is built on relationships, in some cases relationships that had gone on for years. Our customers were losing the people who'd helped shape their movie taste, who'd steered them toward things we knew they'd like and away from things they didn't know they'd hate. We were losing the people that we, in our small way, had been able to help. We were all grieving the loss.

If you think I'm overrating the power of these connections, consider this: Years ago, I helped a lovely, seemingly upstanding woman choose from several Shakespeare adaptations. The next week she returned, asking about the relative merits of zombie movies. Interesting, I thought.

She started coming in regularly. After months of recommendations and some earnest cinematic dismantling ("Like a handful of romantic comedies thrown into a blender," she said of Love, Actually), I became her go-to movie guy. A year later, I became her go-to everything guy when we got married.

This phenomenon isn't uncommon. We at the store ended up dating and/or wedding customers so consistently that it became a running joke from the boss that we were taking money out of his pocket. (Significant others got free rentals.)

Standing at the center of a video store is to watch the world change, a time lapse of people's taste. As the years pile up, some things, even popular things, simply fall out of the cultural consciousness. Videoport fastidiously stocked new releases, but the heart of our store was its permanent collection. Not just a "foreign films" header but subsections of Japanese and Hong Kong exploitation. A dedicated Criterion Collection section next to British comedy. Anime and Bollywood, documentaries, the dark, glittering jewel that was the renowned cult movies section. It took years to build that inventory: A great video store spends its entire life span building up a representation of film history shaped and curated and always there. Things left, of course, but always in response to viewers' needs and our design.

The final filter was the pull list. Every so often the list would appear, a printout of movies and shows that hadn't been rented in a long time, typically a year or more. Any titles crossed off the list were saved. Any still there at the end of the week were out.

There were different strategies for staying the execution of an underperforming title. On the earnest end were pleas for mercy: "I promise I can make it rent" was our version of, "I swear I'll feed it and clean up after it." At their most devious, staffers would simply cross titles off the list without approval, or wait until the movie had been pulled and then just put it back on the shelf.

(I was sometimes guilty of that last tactic. During one pull list session, I was complaining about the imminent execution of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, ready to launch into my reasoned argument about leaving a hole in our Robert Altman collection, when the boss smiled and said, "Well, I assume you'll just do when you usually do.")

By contrast: Netflix routinely adds and removes films at a whim based almost exclusively on licensing agreements. These agreements just don't mean that movies any respectable video store would have remain "unavailable for streaming," but that a substantial portion of Netflix's (rather small) 10,000 film inventory is garbage: direct-to-DVD movies (or movies that bypass DVD for streaming entirely) accepted as part of package deals to get the rights to titles somebody might actually want to see. Although not everything you might want to see. As of this writing, you can't watch Annie Hall, Argo, The Exorcist, This Is Spinal Tap, Taxi Driver, Schindler's List, The Muppet Movie, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Fight Club, or Frozen on Netflix. You can, however, stream Transmorphers or Atlantic Rim, two suspiciously titled low-budget knockoffs of the movie you meant to watch.

The dwindling number of employees who stayed through the ever-leaner years did our best to stem the tide. Being overeducated, underemployed movie geeks, this meant counting on the power of passionate reason to counter the flood of fleeing customers. I started a weekly blog/newsletter for the store. I intended it to be a place for customers and staff to continue the ongoing movie conversation through movie reviews, debates, and think pieces about the store and movies in general. In theory it was, apart from being a chance for me to exercise my brain and writing skills, a way to bind customers to the store by giving them a sense of ownership in the place. In practice, as the customers drifted away, it became more like a running, increasingly desperate 10-year argument as to why our video store deserved to exist, written by me.

But even in our small, art-friendly city, we were abandoned, at first slowly and then very, very quickly. By our last year, each month was down some 30 percent from the already meager takings of the previous year, and it became increasingly clear that there was simply nothing we could do to stop the slide.

When Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix (formerly known as Kibble) in 1997, the company appeared to be little more than an upstart DVD rental business whose only real value proposition was the mail-order element of its operation. Fast forward two decades and Netflix has become one of the biggest TV and movie studios in the world, with more subscribers than all the cable TV channels in America combined. How did Netflix go from renting movies to making them in just 20 years?

Legend has it that Reed Hastings decided to start Netflix after returning a copy of Apollo 13 to his local Blockbuster. Upon returning the movie, Hastings was told that he owed $40 in late fees. Fearing what his wife would say about such a steep late fee and convinced there must a better way to rent movies, Hastings began to devise what would later become Netflix.

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