Impulse movie buying comes to iTunes with movies under $5

I recently gushed about distribution of movies over the Internet supplanting the disc formats thanks to the proliferation that we’re seeing of set-top boxes for the living room. Of course, content is still king, and all of the companies doing digital distribution have shortcomings in their offerings that most consumers won’t like in moving away from a format like DVD. But iTunes took a step closer today, with a new “Movies of the Week” section.

This area offers 10 classic (or classically bad) films for under $5. You know most of these films: Basic Instinct, Air Force One, The Karate Kid, St. Elmo’s Fire, Air America, A Guy Thing, and a collection of some of Governor Schwarzenegger’s best: Total Recall, The Last Action Hero, Red Heat and yes, Terminator 2.

The main key, of course, is price. With a lot of the movies on iTunes, I’m hesitant to pay the $9.99 to $14.99 price tag. Rentals are of course a better deal, but the number of movies you can rent is still pretty limited. But when you bring the purchase price under $5– that’s like a cup of coffee — I’m sold.

I’ve been known to make an impulse DVD buy or two at the local Target with DVDs around $5, but this is better — I don’t even have to leave my couch!

The other key to this deal, is time. Terminator 2 is labeled as the “Movie of the Week” and apparently will only be on sale for a limited time. This is an ingenious (and obvious) move by Apple to force impulse buys. It’s offered limited sales in the past with music (as have rivals like AmazonMP3), and I still think the $0.99 movie of the week rental on iTunes is one of the best things about the movie portion of the store.

It’s been about two years since the movie section of iTunes launched. In that time I’ve bought exactly two movies on iTunes. Tonight, with this new section, I just bought two more.