This phase of cord-cutting feels to me a lot like the component audio phase in home sound systems, circa late 60s into the 80s. I was so into it that I preferred rackmount style components, and had a big steel equipment rack in my living room. What a techbro I was.

So maybe that explains the fun I'm having these days plugging together dongles and flat panel displays and tablets and media servers and gigabit wifi. I understand that that's not for everybody, though. Sounds like you're closer to the appliance preference, but with a willingness to experiment with things like Chromecast.

What you've heard about the Amazon license terms is correct, and I'd expect Google's (and Vudu's and all the rest) to be the same. That's what it says, and though it hasn't happened to me yet (but how would I know, without constantly testing every cloud video and downloaded WMV file to make sure it still works?), it sure doesn't give me a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. I feel like it's a bit fraudulent to label the buttons "Buy" or "Purchase", when you never actually get to take unimpeded possession of what you paid for.

Lots of people resent the current "digital rights [theirs] management" regime, and there's lots of software to make unencrypted archival copies of videos you've "purchased" that way. From what I can tell from the descriptions, most of them are not (they believe) violating DMCA because they don't break the encryption, they record from the screen after the licensed decoding software has done its work. I can't imagine that would work well, though, but judging by the size of the genre when you search, people seem willing to settle for crappy recordings for the sense of control they reclaim from it.