Question, what do you call a service that offers you hit movies, great TV shows, and Pandora premium for free in exchange for watching ads? Well, aside from awesome and the greatest thing to happen to movie watching since netflix, you call it Hitbliss. Hitbliss is, well, was, a free service that lets you watch ads in exchange for digital currency so you can rent movies, buy tv episodes, and subscribe to Pandora One. I was invited to the private beta about a year ago, and loved it greatly.

So what exactly is hitbliss? Well about a year ago, a new service was launched where you could watch targeted advertizements for money to use in the hitbliss store. What could be bought in the hitbliss store? Well in the beginning you could only buy TV episodes and rent movies directly from hitbliss. At the very beginning, the selection was very large. They had some major networks and lots of TV shows. They also had a movie selection so large it rivaled blockbuster and family video combined. It was great. Sure, there was a 7 item limit a day, but whatever. I bought 2 things a day at most. I saw some movies, bought some episodes of Green Lantern the animated series, and after I got all the episodes of Green Lantern, I would get Young Justice.

Well, then things changed a little bit. Hitbliss lost the license to many of their TV shows and movies. This essentially gutted their entire TV selection. They lost most of their movies as well, but there were still enough interesting movies. I lost the ability to buy Green Lantern. I still had access to the episodes, but not they would surely expire soon. I watched the episodes, and stocked up on the couple of shows they had that I was still interested in.

Then the best thing to happen to Hitbliss happened; the ability to buy TV shows and rent movies through Amazon Instant Video. Yes, the same Amazon that has hundreds of TV shows and movies. Sure, you weren't given free reign of Amazon's entire content library, but you got lots TV shows and movies, almost the same number as in the beginning. What's more, whereas hitbliss's personal content library was shrinking by the day, their Amazon offers grew by the day. And to add to make things even better, since it's through Amazon, I now have the episodes through my personal Amazon instant video library, and my ability to watch them is based on Amazon's ability to retain the rights to the content. It wasn't soon after the Amazon addition did I lose the ability to watch Green Lantern. However, I don't have that fear with Amazon. In the first day, there was a bit of a glitch where I could buy unlimited content from Amazon. That day I bought the first couple seasons of Breaking Bad. After day one they instituted a daily 3 purchase limit of Amazon content. I then bought the remaining episodes of Breaking Bad, bought some episodes of the walking dead, and a couple other things. They also gave users the ability to buy Pandora One subscriptions at about this time, but since I don't use Pandora, I didn't care to try it, but I'm sure it was great.

Now is when things started to become less than great. In the first month of Amazon, Hitbliss still had a fair amount of Hitbliss content. I could reach the Amazon limit but there was still enough Hitbliss content to buy with the remaining 4 purchases. Well, after 4 months of Amazon content, Hitbliss dropped the Amazon purchase limit from 3 a day to 5 a week. That was quite lame. To make matters worse, Hitbliss continued with their dropping hitbliss content and gaining Amazon content. So let me break things down for you, Hitbliss still had the 7 purchases a day limit, so a total of 49 possible purchases a week, but only 5 of them could be Amazon, a little over 10% of your purchases could be Amazon. Then at this time, Amazon content made up over 75% of the hitbliss store. This was really annoying. I could only buy 75% of the available content 10% of the time. I made it work though, buy 4 episodes of Archer and a movie a week.

Then this bomb shell happened. About a week ago I got an email from Hitbliss saying that they're undergoing major changes. Essentially that meant they were shutting down the service for an undisclosed amount of time. I'm like "whaaaat?" I love hitbliss, it kept me sane through my previous semester. I'd watch a movie every weekend to help me destress. I had so many more shows an movies to watch. This is really hitting me hard. Hitbliss, if you're reading this, please come back. You're awesome. Well, here's to it coming back.