AOL is offering a promotional deal through the end of February where for 99 cents you can download movies and watch them on your local machine. This is the first pricing model for digital distribution I’ve seen that actually works for me – I would pay 99 cents to in effect rent a movie in the comfort of my own home. The restrictions – you only get to ‘keep’ it for 30 days and once you start watching the film you have only 24 hours to finish watching it – seem reasonable to me, and hackers will end up breaking the DRM anyway so if the restrictions bother you I’m sure it will end up being possible to bypass them. Too bad this is a limited time deal – if someone moves to a model like this I might actually return to the practice of ‘renting’ movies again.

Oh…you can read up on the details of the deal over on arstechnica