> And please none of this "Rent for $3.99 or rent for $4.99 in HD". Just give me one price and the best quality version that you can.

As perhaps a reason why they'd do this. Some of us are on bandwidth caps. Watching/downloading too many HD movies can put you over your monthly cap pretty easily.

I actually like that they give the user the choice.

Sure, but why charge more? Just offer a "max resolution" setting.

The true answer lies in price discrimination.

> Sure, but why charge more?

Well twice the resolution in 2 axis is 4 times the pixels, which means higher costs. I think it's reasonable.

> The true answer lies in price discrimination.

Actually its a mix of both, price discrimination and costs. No need to be so negative.

The bandwidth will cost less than twenty cents extra, probably far less (based on a rough estimate of S3 bandwidth costs, starting $0.12/GB down to $0.05 and under at scale). Because of peering agreements, it could actually be free. Yes, I realize there's more to it than that, but the cost difference is tiny at Apple's scale.

It also feels... scammy. "For just 25% more, you can have the version that doesn't suck!" That kind of attitude does not make me want to do business with them. Of course, this is just as much the fault of the last five years of TV marketing talking about how awful anything SD is, when in practicality it's more than adequate unless you have an absurdly large screen.

> And please none of this "Rent for $3.99 or rent for $4.99 in HD". Just give me one price and the best quality version that you can.

Why not? Are you happier if they instead say "Rent for $4.99" and nothing else?

Most products come in multiple price points, do you also dislike the fact that there are cheap/expensive models of computers, cars, TVs...

I would, yes. As it stands, I only see the lowest price for each movie (and I'm not interested in this lower price). I'm only interested in the "HD" price, and getting to that info takes an extra click to the movie's info screen (and then I need to go back to the listing screen once I've seen it).

This might sound like "white people problems" but it's annoying and hurts the experience.

The entire subject is somewhat "first world problems", so ignore that.

So really your issue is with UI, maybe they could allow you to change which price point is shown to you? Because reducing down to a single price point, sure it might be good in that they're playing less mind games, but if you end up paying higher prices it surely isn't a good change.

Roku's Amazon interface is terrible with pricing. In the browse view the CTA I get is "Purchase from $2.99!"

But when you click into detail, it's actually: rent in SD for $2.99, rent in HD for $4.99, buy for $19.99.

I don't really care that much, but I can see how it comes off as scammy. If it wasn't Amazon doing it, I think a lot more people would have a problem with it.

I would be happier. It would mean they're not trying to play tricks with anchoring and they can't easily push the price up even higher later. They wouldn't have people "compromising" with the $4 version or being tricked into thinking $5 is suddenly a 'deal' because it's only a dollar!! more.