Amazon.de started a service where you can rent DVDs. The idea is - similar to other existing online DVD rentals - that you pay about 10€ per month and can have one DVD at home all times. So, they send you a DVD, you keep it, sometimes you send it back, get the next one.

Now, cool: amazon, one of the biggest web shops has DVD rental. So I would expect that I can rent now all those nice DVDs they have in the shop. It would be perfect: in Kaiserslautern there is no specialised DVD rental service and we cannot get all the interesting movies (for example, the top 100 of IMDB cannot be retrieved in Kaiserslautern).
If amazon rented everything, it would improve something.

But no. Search for all the good titles - you can't rent them.
A few examples:

• Texas Chainsaw Massacer - DVD at amazon in three different versions, no rental
• Hotel Rwanda - DVD at amazon shop, award winning movie. IMDB place 47. no rental
• Shichinin no samurai - not at amazon.de at all (hm)
• Animal House - one of the most successfull movies ever, part of american heritage, sold in amazon shop but no rental

This sucks. I only signed up there to get "Animal House" but they don't rent it.

So what will happen? These online DVD rentals will steal income from local rentals, so expect that your local stores will close or get a more limited program. All online DVD rentals probably have the same blockbusting entertainment. I hope that someone points me to a good alternative online DVD rental, where I can get above DVDs.

Go support your local weirdo video rental, where you can meet fellow weirdos and can have interesting conversations.