Gee Sean. That was kinda rude, wasn't it? I mean, no one rags on you for watching, say, all those mind-numbing sitcoms ... I'm just sayin'.

Finally!

A studio out to milk the consumer as much as possible by expiring the download.

Yeesh. OK, Apple may not have a perfect system, but it's really damn good in terms of media selection, fair, and of course, pretty damn usable, so why try anything else? Because you want to beta test something that's unproven?

sigh. The studios will never learn.

One correction: you can rewind or fast forward after the entire file is downloaded and it calls home.

I wouldn't say my wife is dumb as she's a forensics anthropologist. She did however miss last night's premiere and decided to give CBS a try. This is the one and only time she will use what she calls "a user hostile environment."

Let's begin with the fact that the video says it downloaded and listed itself at being 44 mins and some secs long. After about 8 mins it ended as it was still missing about 500MB of the 600MB download. Add to this an inability to rewind or fast forward while viewing. That's insane. She's re-downloading the video while still in her rental period and is miffed that she will have to watch the first 10 mins again rather than skip that part... unless this download 'fails' as well. The first download did say that only 108MB had been downloaded but that it was Finished. There was no button for "Say Isn't There More to this File."

The picture quality for a video file that's 600MB in size is crap. I could've downloaded a much higher quality HD video from some bittorrent feed. And with the this kind of treatment by CBS...

BTW, I've purchased numerous TV shows from iTunes.

because if you're dumb enough to watch this show in the first place, you'd be dumb enough to "rent" it off the web.

"I'm not sure what the big deal is there... why not just let consumers keep the video?"

Because in the big picture they would rather you didn't own any content and just rented it from them again and again. This is like asking why not give people high resolution downloads. Or why not get rid of the DRM cruft so people can do what they like with their files. What is good for the consumer, and what the consumer wants, is so far down the list for big media that it is a non-factor.