Well, with the exception of price point. Maybe it's because I've been spoiled by Steam, but $10-$15 to buy a movie that's 10+ years ago. I would've paid the same price if I bought it a month or two after release, or bought a ticket to see it in the theater.

If they can ever match the $40-$60 to $5-$10 price decay by waiting a year, then I think a-la-carte could make more sense, but currently for the price of buying 1 HD movie on Amazon, I get one month of Netflix for a month.

If I wanted to watch a new movie every week or so, a la carte is currently prohibitive.

You should use the renting prices instead of the buying prices to compare against other subscription services. $2.99 to watch a movie in the evening is anything but prohibitive. Or buying TV seasons, which amounts to close enough to the same hourly cost in my experience.

It’s less than I remember rentals costing when physical rentals were a thing, and while it’s certainly less cheap than a $10/mo subscription service, it seems like a stretch to call it prohibitive to most people. A season of a show plus a half dozen movies comes out to like $40/mo (ignoring all the ‘free’ stuff).

$40/mo for a vast selection isn’t fantastic, but in my eyes, it pokes holes in the pirate’s “If it were just more convenient while affordable I’d pay, I swear.”

Now I know Amazon is more stable that most other streaming services, but so far, my Canadian experience has been to have digital purchases of movies I have made be shuffled from one service to another as they fold, or are acquired, with differences in quality, or "expirations", etc.

Renting I don't mind, but as a consumer my preference is to buy Blu-ray movies in the highest quality available, and then rip them. I am a huge screen buff, and have boxes of physical media (blu-ray, dvd, VHS, and even a couple of beta tapes in storage), but it's endlessly frustrating that a large number of classic movies are only available in "remastered" editions, that destroy the fidelity and classic feel of the original movies by updating special effects, or committing the sins that George Lucas did of adding entirely new scenes to movies that undermine the overall quality of the movies ("Jabba, you're a wonderful human being."), let alone re-cutting the movies from full-screen to pan and scan. I recognize that the recuts have broader mass market appeal, but some of the history of how classic cinematic masterpieces were made, and how film making changed over time is lost to new audiences when those changes are made.