Fancy a cheap movie night? Well, we've been browsing the "Redeem" section of Microsoft Rewards (otherwise known as Rewards with Xbox) over the past few days, and have come across a special offer for certain countries.
It turns out this has quietly been available for a couple of months now, and it's an HD movie rental from the folks over at Rakuten. For the price of 1,785 Xbox / Microsoft Rewards points, you can get a voucher worth £6 here in the UK.
Here's a look at the offer:
And here's a closer look at the terms and conditions:
"Offer valid for users who search with Bing on 5 different days within a maximum of 2 weeks from the moment the offer is activated in their Microsoft Rewards dashboard. Eligible users will receive a unique code redeemable for one (1) HD movie rental on Rakuten TV for the value of £5.49 in the UK and €5.99 in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Eligible users will receive 1 movie to redeem on Rakuten TV. One reward per user. Offer subject to availability. Microsoft reserves the right to modify or cancel this promotion at any time. Rakuten TV Terms & Conditions apply."
We've tried this for ourselves here at Pure Xbox, and it works well! To activate it, we went to the Microsoft Rewards dashboard on a browser, navigated to the "Redeem" section and found the offer (it won't appear for you if you're not eligible for it), hit the "Redeem Reward" button and then waited around 24 hours for the voucher code to appear.
The code was then accessible in the "Order History" part of the Microsoft Rewards dashboard, and could be used on the Rakuten TV website for any movie rental we came across. Most of the rentals are £5.49 on there, meaning the voucher covers the entire cost of it, although some are £15.99 - and so you get £6 off the price of those instead.
Unfortunately, the big catch from an Xbox perspective is that there's no dedicated app for Rakuten TV on Xbox consoles, and we've been encountering errors when trying to watch through the Microsoft Edge browser app. By all means give it a try, but beware that you'll probably have to use a separate device to watch your film.
Anyway, you might not be interested in this (and keep in mind it's only for a few countries), but we still wanted to bring it to your attention. It's always worth checking the browser version of Microsoft Rewards for the largest number of redeemable rewards, as the "Rewards on Xbox" version on console sometimes misses a few of these out.
Oh, and don't forget that Microsoft Rewards will be having a sale on gift cards in October, with Xbox gift cards to be included as part of that! Still no concrete details on what to expect yet - we'll let you know as soon as we can.