On those long, cold winter nights in New Zealand, there is nothing more satisfying than being able to curl up in front of the TV and watch a rented movie…Renting, as opposed to buying, means you can secretly watch that B-grade schlock you’ve been wanting to watch for ages, without ever having your friends discover the aforementioned movie sitting on your shelf (What’s this? Kevin Costner in Waterworld? Oh the shame!)

Now online movie rentals, that’s another thing entirely. It’s one of the selling points of the Apple TV. It should be a seamless, empowering experience.. freeing you up from having to venture out into the dark, cold night; weave through the suicidal traffic and converse in grunting noises with some spotty-faced video store clerk. You can also browse the movie catalogue at your leisure, view trailers as you go and there’s always a copy to rent…Bliss.

However; renting movies from the iTunes store in New Zealand just leaves me feeling ripped off… No, it’s not Apple’s pricing. NZD$4.99 for a rental is OK (I can get a new release with a coupon for NZD$4.00 from a video store). The problem lies with the NZ ISP’s.

Take, for instance, my service provider. I get a pretty good speed (10Mb/s) from my cable connection.. and all for the princely sum of NZD$79.95. Sounds pretty reasonable… except I have a data cap of 20Gb/month.

Let’s explore this theme. If I were to rent, the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King from the iTunes store it would cost me $4.99. But LOTR is a 2.17Gb download (for the SD version!) That’s almost 11 per cent of my monthly download allowance, or $8.67. Add that to my rental cost and we have a rental that is going to cost me NZD$13.66. But, to add insult to injury, I have chewed through 3 days worth of data in a day… that is likely to leave me short at the end of the month.

My ISP charges me an additional $2.95 per Gb over my allowance… that extra 2.17Gb means my bill will increase by 3 Units or NZD$8.85..

As I said in the headline… What’s the point?