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Apple to Announce iTunes Movie Rentals?
An anonymous reader writes "Think Secret is reporting that the next Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference may be the company's platform to announce movie rentals via iTunes. The files would probably have a built-in shutoff timer, or only allow a certain number of viewings." From the article: "Apple is said to have ironed out agreements with Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros., and is currently in talks with other major movie studios as well. It's unknown to what extent content will be available come the August 7 announcement, or whether Apple will announce all of its studio deals at that time ... Apple had been trying for months to persuade the movie studios that the a-la-carte model of buying individual titles, as the iTunes Music Store offers with music, was the way to go. The studios, however, have been fixed on offering only a subscription or rental-based model."
Pirates announce a hack you can download from some website that turns off whatever that flag is, the studios go berserk as millions of copies of movies circulate from ipods onto some movie-napster-like site, and we start the whole music-anti-piracy rigamarole again but with ipod movies. Will no one ever learn?
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A significant number of people, sucking down 5-8Gb every day or so. I think we'll start to see the ISP's enforcing their (unwritten) bandwidth limits.
Now if they could only get my iPod battery to last long enough to get through more than 70 minutes of video... I really don't think that movies on an iPod are going to be viable until the batteries improve. Either I will have to watch a movie in two parts or I will have to watch it tethered to my PC in which case I might as well use a service other than iTunes.
Honestly, WHY do you think buying music on allofmp3 is different then pirating it? Why do you want to buy the music? I see two possibilities: 1. you want to thank the artist and give him some money 2. you feel guilty if you use eMule, so you go to allofmp3 and download the songs for a very cheap price.
You know full well the artist is seeing NO compensation when you buy his stuff from allofmp3. If you still want his songs, just steal them yourself already, instead of hiring goons to do it for you.
Global warming is a cube.
What is it about movie rental service that you don't understand? When you rent a movie, you have to return it the end of the specified time period or pay a fine. Surely you don't mean that you should be able to pay a rental fee and get to keep the movie file forever? So what, exactly, is wrong with DRM that enforces a rental agreement? As someone else posted, if you don't like the rental terms, then don't rent the movie.
Secondly, nobody is even making the slightest suggestion that this time-limited DRM would apply to songs (but see point four below).
Third, the only area where there has been any "DRM creep" is the reduction in the number of times a playlist can be burned from 10 to 7. You fail to mention that DRM was simulatneously liberalized to allow a person to play their iTMS purchased music on 5 computers instead of 3. A slight, practically meaningless, restriction on the one hand, a somewhat meaningful liberalization on the other. You can't even claim "creep" because there is no trend. It is just a fiction.
Fourth, one of the most common complaints about iTunes is the lack of a music rental service, like the one offered by Napster or Yahoo!. If Apple were to respond to this complaint and offer a music rental service, they would have to do something like Microsoft's Janus DRM that causes the music to become unplayable if the user does not check in to show the subscription is current. By your reasoning, Apple's response to this demand is just DRM creep. They can't win, apparently.