GooglePLAY: rent any movie for $1.50 [HD, No Ads]

If you are part of the Google PLAY digital ecosystem, when you peruse the Google PLAY store, you will find an offer that allows you to rent any movie in digital HD for $1.50. You have to manually add the offer to your Google PLAY account by clicking through it using a web browser or traversing the Play Store Android app.

The offer runs until July 8, 2017. If you don’t use it, it expires. You can use it for one movie, It will get discounted automatically, and you will see the discount before you pay for the rental. You can also verify that the offer is in your account by going at the “Account” part of your GooglePLAY and looking under “Rewards”:

Weekend Sale: Arrival (Digital HD) for $5

For the weekend only, for Amazon Prime members only, the recent movie “Arrival” is on sale for $5 in Digital HD, without any ads at Amazon Instant Video. This is “digital ownership”, not a movie rental. You can watch it forever once you buy it!

This is a 2 hour movie, so you are paying $2.50 per hour, or 4c per minute. If you were buying movies like bulk food 🙂

PS: you only see the sale price IF you are logged on to your Amazon account AND you are a Prime member. Otherwise you will see the regular price.

Prometheus for $5 to own in digital HD

If you like to digitally-own movies, you can get the Prometheus movie in HD (without ads) for $5 at Amazon Instant Video. This is not a rental but “digital ownership”. You can watch it as much as you want as long as you want. But you can’t sell it or give it away to other people like you can with a DVD or Blu-Ray.

This is a limited time sale, but it’s not a lightning deal.

Digital movie for $5: The Handmaid’s Tale

Smartly piggy-backing on the buzz generated by the new TV series on Hulu, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Amazon Instant Video is offering the 1990 adaptation of the book on sale, in digital HD (without ads) for just $5. This is a digital purchase, not a rental! If you have any slow-shipping credits, they will be automatically applied to your order.

Most TV and cable networks (even HBO) make the pilot episodes of high-profile new TV series available online for FREE everywhere to generate interest and buzz and subsequently produce more subscriptions, but apparently Hulu is not taking that route, they are using the new show as a carrot to get people to sign-up for free trials instead 🙂 That’s where their priorities lie at the moment!

99c HD rental: Inferno (Tom Hanks)

If you like to rent movies in HD online, and watch without annoying ads, good until 4/17/17, Amazon Instant Video is offering 99c rentals of Tom Hanks’s Inferno movie. Once you rent it, you have 30 days to begin watching. Once you begin watching, you have 48 hours to finish it. If you don’t begin watching within 30 days, you lose it, and you get no refund.

PS: I don’t know if this is eligible for digital credits ~ if yes, then you can watch it for free if you have $0.99+ in slow-shipping or other Amazon promotional credits.

How to redeem the 99c movie rental promotion with the Google Play Office Depot promotion

Google Play has developed new “technology” when it comes to running physical gift card promotions. They run a promotion at Office Depot until 3/11/17 that got you the bonus of renting any Google Play movie for just 99c (eg you could use it for the $6 Arrival rental) IF you purchase a plastic physical Google Play gift card at Office Depot.

But the promotion does not print at the cash register. It gets linked behind the scenes to your specific gift card when you make the Office Depot purchase. This worked on all gift card options, I did this with a $10 gift card.

So in order to redeem the offer, you go to your Google Play account and redeem the gift card the same way you do always. When you do…

[Read more…]

Buy Google Play Gift Card ($10+), Get 99c Digital Movie Rental

At Office Depot and Office Max brick and mortar stores, until the close of business on Saturday 3/11/17, if you buy one of the plastic Google PLAY gift cards, you will receive a promo code that can get you a 99c movie rental on any movie available at Google Play. This is a pretty good deal if you want to rent new releases which go as high as $5.99 (eg Arrival). A $10 Gift Card is the minimum, which is still pretty good!

I haven’t done this offer yet. I will let you know how it goes. I will also check to see whether you can pay for this with Office Depot-Max Rewards or not (which would make it an even better deal).

Two free Star Wars digital comic books with Rogue One digital pre-order

If you place a pre-order for the Star Wars Rogue One movie in digital HD at Amazon Instant Video, you are entitled to receive two free digital comic books at Comixology. They are two specific #1s, of Star Wars (2015-) and Darth Vader (2015-). Amazon owns Comixology so you can just login with your regular Amazon account there, you don’t need to create a new one.

The promotion runs until April 30, in 2017, so it will also be good after the movie gets released (purchases instead of pre-orders). Here are the terms of this promotion.

Google Play: Half off a digital Movie purchase

While putzing around Google Play, be on the look out for a new promotion that gets you half-off the digital purchase (not rental) of a movie. The offer shows up when you are wondering about. You have to click the “Redeem Now” in the app. Once you do, the offer will show up in your Google Play account under the “Account” category, further down under the “Rewards” section. You can see them all there, and they include the expiration date too.

A screenshot from an Android smartphone is shown below:

Rent any movie (even new releases) for $0.99 w/coupon

This is a great deal. For just $0.99, you can rent any movie, including new releases, HD and without ads, at Amazon Instant Video when you enter coupon code MOVIE99 over there until 1/23/17. You don’t have to watch the movie right away. You can enter the coupon code right now, but rent the movie at any time until the deadline.

Once you rent an actual movie, you have 30 calendar days to begin watching it. Once you begin watching it, you have either 24 or 48 hours (it depends on the movie) to watch it as many times as you want. So don’t start the movie playback until you are ready to watch it. Also don’t wait until the last minute to enter the coupon or make the rental. Better early than late 🙂

More details on the promotion, along with official instructions at the Amazon Instant Video promotional page.

50% off Google Play Movie Rental (YMMV)

In addition to the previosuly mentioned 20% off purchase promotion, Google Play is also running another promotion you may see in your emails or while browsing around their website or Store on an Android device, you get 50% off when you rent a digital movie of your choice. Strategically this is a great promotion for newly released movies which have insane rental price of up to $6 or $7. The offer ends 1/22/17 if not used.

YMMV as usual as to whether it is offered on your account, since I have no way of testing this for everyone…

Here’s a screenshot with the description:

google_play_half_off_movie_rental

GOOGLE PLAY TIP

If you tend to forget about these offers after you add them to your account, you are not the only one. I do too. However, you can easily find them in your Google Play account, go to the Account section in the left sidebar if you are using a web browser, and page down to the Rewards section. You will see all the activated offers there with the expiration date prominently displayed. Here’s a screenshot example below:

google_play_list_of_offers_in_account

20% off one movie (digital purchase) at Google Play

If you are using Google Play, check your emails or notifications or navigate the store to see if you are eligible for this automated promotion, it gets you 20% off the digital purchase of a single movie of your choice until 11/30/16. This happens automatically in the cart there after you click on the promotional link. There’s no coupon code to manually enter. You will see during checkout whether your order will qualify or not for the promotional discount. Here’s a screenshot explaining the terms:

google_play_20off_movie

Free Movies with Ads from Vudu

If you like to stream movies but hate to pay a monthly fee or buy/rent movies or you are looking for specific movies that are not already available through your current services, there is a new alternative now, a new services launched by Vudu called Movies On Us, or perhaps a more realistic name for it, “Vudu with Ads” 🙂

There are hundreds of movies available, along with nearly 600 documentaries and two dozen TV shows. TV shows are its weakest point, the most famous of them is Syfy’s Dresden Files. Documentaries are perhaps your best bet with this service, as they feature a variety of topics, including some good choices on music (both performance and meta).

Movies are older but there’s a lot of them, and they are recognizable, it’s not like it’s filled with straight to DVD movies 🙂 You get titles such as “Carrie”, “Margin Call”, “Phantom of the Opera”, “Star Dust”, “Aeon Flux”, Star Trek Nemesis”, “Dead Man Walking”, “Midnight Cowboy”, “Narc” and more.

Overall, this is a good idea if you can stomach ads and/or don’t like to pay 🙂

99c HD Movie Rentals at Amazon (limited time offer)

If you like to rent movies digitally (and you actually end up watching them within the 30 days before they expire), Amazon has a hot new 99c Weekend Rental promotion. These are ad-free movies in HD that you can watch at some point within 30 days after you rent them. If you don’t watch them, you don’t get a refund, you lose the money.

There are some well-known movies, no blockbusters obviously, but still recognizable, such as:

  • “Allegiant”, part of the Divergent series
  • “Keanu”, from the Key and Peele duo, also of original MadTV fame
  • “Dirty Grandpa”, De Niro and Efron, G-d Save us all from this movie 🙂
  • “Money Monster”, “Marauders”, “Criminal” and more

TIP: Better yet, if you are a Prime member, you can automatically use the “slow shipping” digital credits towards the payment for these rentals, so you may end up paying nothing out of your pocket if you have some credit. It is typically $1 per slow-shipment, so it’s essentially one movie per credit. The credits do expire eventually, so if you are close to expiration (check the emails that Amazon sends when these are earned, there is no simple way to get to the expiration dates as far as I know), this may be one way to use them without spending any additional money.

PS: you can rent as many of these as you want.

25% off Star Trek Beyond Digital Copy with Vudu coupon for T-Mobile customers

If you previously redeemed any of the Vudu $5.50 store credit offers through T-Mobile Tuesdays, check your email address that is associated with your Vudu account. You may find a unique coupon code that gets you 25% off the current price of the brand new “Star Trek Beyond” movie. The current price for the HDX (1080p) digital copy is $20, so the coupon make it $15.

vudu_startrek_beyond

The coupon must be used by 10/17/16 at 11:59pm ET and can only be used once and only for this particular title.

Regardless of where you buy the movie, Vudu is planning a Viewing Party using the social media hashtag “#VuduViewingParty” at 9pm Eastern on Friday 10/7/16. Vudu won’t be airing the movie, you have to own it on your own and play it on your own, and follow people’s commentary using the social media hashtag.