{"id":3863,"date":"2019-04-27T11:13:42","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T15:13:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=3863"},"modified":"2019-10-06T16:24:21","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T20:24:21","slug":"getting-paid-to-watch-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2019\/04\/getting-paid-to-watch-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Paid to Watch Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few years I have been buying a lot of Blu-ray movies, really entirely too many. Sometimes they come with a digital copy that can be stored on a service like Vudu or Movies Anywhere, and sometimes they do not. Vudu has an interesting service called Disc to Digital that lets you buy a digital copy of a movie you already own on disc, but it only works on maybe a third of the titles I have that didn’t come with a digital copy already (depends a lot on the studio releasing the title with Fox and Sony often working, but most others not). To prove ownership, you can use the Vudu phone app to scan the Blu-ray case UPC barcode while you are at your house. Using the GPS coordinates of the phone and confirming the UPC tells them that you have the disk at your house (this is called Mobile Disc to Digital) instead of scanning them in a store. Another way to do it is to load the disk into your computer and a desktop Vudu app will read it to confirm you have the actual disk (called Disc to Digital Home). That’s great except none of my computers have a Blu-ray drive, only DVD. There are ways to cheat that system, but I don’t really want to cheat the system. Then you pay $2 to get a digital copy, which is a great deal since most digital movies cost $10-20 to buy and cost more than $2 just to rent. Most of the movies I have gotten for $1 at Dollar Tree have a replacement UPC code stuck very securely over the original UPC code and D2D won’t let you use those barcodes to buy a D2D movie (sometimes Dollar Tree will put the sticker on the clear plastic cover instead of the paper insert with the artwork and UPC code, so you can still scan the original code). I have tried peeling the sticker off, but this generally does not go well and there is still no guarantee the movie will be eligible for D2D. I wrote about a lot of this earlier, mostly in the replies to my post about Digital HD<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This still left me with a lot of movies without a digital copy, so I wound up buying an external Blu-ray drive and ripping those titles<\/a> and making one of my computers a Plex server<\/a>. But the drive also lets me use the Disc to Digital Home method of reading the discs. Not only did this work on movies where the UPC code had been covered with a sticker, but some movies that hadn’t been eligible using Mobile D2D were eligible for D2D Home. For the dollar movies, paying $2 more for a digital copy is expensive, but getting a Blu-ray and<\/em> digital copy for only $3 is still pretty good. Between the two different methods I have done this over 30 times, sometimes getting a small discount of 5% or 10% cash back on a deal via my Bank of America credit card. Recently Vudu offered a deal where if you converted 10 titles, you got a free $5 credit. I looked and had maybe 15 or so titles I could convert, most of them pretty good movies, but some not so much, or things I hadn’t even watched yet that seemed worth $1. Doing research on that deal, I found one guy who said that even though that’s a good deal, he gets an even better deal 12 times a year when Vudu will give you a $2 credit for watching a movie with ads. I looked more into that and sporadically they do seem to do this. Then you can use the $2 credit on a D2D purchase. The problem is they don’t really advertise this deal and when people find out it is usually the day of the deal, so you have to check the forums every day. I went ahead and did the $5 credit for buying 10 at $2 each. Plus I had a 5% cash back thing via my credit card, so I could get $26 worth of redemptions for $20, bringing the price down to $1.54 each (for years Vudu had a deal where if you got 10 at a time, you could get them for $1 each, but I didn’t have enough movies to redeem when they were offering that and that offer has since expired).<\/p>\n

So I redeemed 12 movies, leaving me with $1 in credit at Vudu and $1 cash back coming from my credit card. But I started checking the boards for that $2 credit deal for watching a movie. They seem to usually happen at the end of the month when Vudu promotes movies you can watch for free that contain ads that are about to be dropped from the service after that month is over. They made the offer on Thursday of this week, April 25. It is a little tricky because they don’t really mention the deal anywhere except in promotional emails people sign up for. I don’t want a daily email from Vudu, but people post the link online. I am still not sure if you have to use the link or just watch the movie on the correct day (edit: just have to watch on the correct day), but I used the link on my laptop and played a movie (Paddington<\/em>, which I had seen before and liked<\/a>) on my laptop. You don’t necessarily have to be in front of the laptop watching while it plays, but I watched a lot of the movie anyway to make sure (which was good because the internet connection kept dropping for some reason) and to see how intrusive the ads were. The ads aren’t bad, maybe two 20-second ads every 15 minutes or so, which is way better than broadcast (for Glad bags and Orville Redenbocker popcorn, thank you). Despite the internet drops, I hoped for the best, and sure enough the next day they emailed me a code which I redeemed for a $2 credit. The fine print said I had until July 24 to redeem the code and then had to use the credit within 30 days of redemption. So you could save up a few of these over a couple of months to build up maybe $6 in credits.<\/p>\n

One of my dollar store buys was the 2005 movie Capote<\/em>, which was not Mobile D2D eligible, but when I put the disc in my drive, I was surprised to see it seemed to think it was a copy of the 1967 movie In Cold Blood<\/em> (based on Capote’s book). It turns out there was a combo pack at one point that included both movies, so I think that is what got Vudu confused. I had already ripped Capote<\/em>, but this was nice because now I could get In Cold Blood<\/em> for free basically, which is what I did.<\/p>\n

If I can find the deal each month and as long as Vudu continues to do this, this could be a great thing. The credits expire within a month, so you can’t build up a huge balance, but this would let me convert even my most marginal D2D eligible titles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past few years I have been buying a lot of Blu-ray movies, really entirely too many. Sometimes they come with a digital copy that can be stored on a service like Vudu or Movies Anywhere, and sometimes they do not. Vudu has an interesting service called Disc to Digital that lets you buy … Continue reading “Getting Paid to Watch Movies”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3863"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4001,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3863\/revisions\/4001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}