Josh Hendrickson
Last March, Movies Anywhere announced it would make a Screen Pass digital lending program to let your friends and family borrow your digital copies of movies. After a lengthy beta, Screen Pass is now available to everyone. With some limits.
Screen Pass works a lot like handing your DVDs to a friend. Only skip the dirty DVDs, everyone just needs a Movies Anywhere account. You create a Screen Pass for your chosen title and hand it out to a friend or family member; then, they can watch your movie copy.
Viewers have 14 days to start the film, and 72 hours to finish watching. That’s pretty similar to digital movie rental terms, just without the need to hand over a payment. But you can’t share every movie on the service.
Movies Anywhere says about 80% of its catalog is eligible for sharing. That’s about 6,500 movies, and the list is growing. But some movies can’t be shared. And you can only share three screen passes a month, which likely cuts down on using Screen Pass as a method to avoid paying for movies altogether. It’s a lending service, after all.
You can pair up a Screen Pass with Movies Anywhere’s Watch Together feature, though, so if your friend wants to see a movie with you, but you need to stay apart because of the global pandemic, this is a decent solution to the problem.
Screen Pass is available to all U.S. customers starting today.
via TechCrunch
