I give that arrangement until your friend realizes he can only shift his content onto 5 devices, at which point his content is lost forever. Or when his hard drive crashes and he realizes he can't re-download tv episodes.
Personally, I value my money too much to spent $100 to "rent" tv shows. My pain point is being able to own the things I buy. Until then, it's bittorrent until the bluray comes out, then buying that.
That's not a fair characterization of iTunes' restrictions. You can use purchased movies and TV shows on up to five computers, and ten 'associated devices', but Apple TVs don't count towards the ten. The content is never 'lost forever', you can always deregister one or (even if you no longer have access to them) all of your devices to register a new one.
[edit: you can also - although this is fairly recent - redownload an unlimited number of times to registered computers, devices or Apple TVs]
But this is just a threshold issue. What does the difference in cost have to be for you to rent vs buy.
Let's say it's $60 to buy a season of a show on hard media that you can watch as many times you want and yes, you own something that will collect dust for a life time. Perhaps you can resell it, but that just means your initial cost was lower and you in a sense rented it for the difference in price for that time period.
Now if the cost to rent is say $20 for a season would that be worth hassle free experience of the content? How about $10, $5? At some threshold the value vs cost starts to make sense.
Personally, I value my money too much to spent $100 to "rent" tv shows. My pain point is being able to own the things I buy. Until then, it's bittorrent until the bluray comes out, then buying that.