And by ‘rent’ I of course mean ‘buy’ – that’s just not as catchy. Yes, rumor has it that Amazon is looking into purchasing the online movie rental service, and it was from a substantial enough source (Bank of America analyst Brian Pitz) that it caused shares of Netflix to jump 5% today on Wall Street.

I think it’d be a nice purchase for Amazon but would it be worth the reported $1.5-2 billion? Maybe, especially if the two of them could get together and combine both of their sloppy movie download services into an actual good one.

As Amazon sells a ton of DVDs and Netflix rents a ton of them, maybe they could start some kind of rent-to-own service where you could simply log on to Amazon and pay a small fee to keep a movie if you like it enough after renting it.

[UPDATE]: This is very interesting – a big hold-up in an Amazon/Netflix potential deal could be the Internet sales tax rules. Currently Amazon only has to charge it in a few states where they physically have distribution centers. Netflix meanwhile has centers in almost all states meaning that if Amazon bought them, Amazon would have to start charging sales tax in all those states – making their prices much less enticing…

The Congress and Senate are always tossing around ideas for a nationwide Internet sales tax and they’ll be debating it again in the fall – Amazon could wait until then to make a move.