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Apple and Fox Set to Announce Movie Rental Deal
mudimba writes "Apple and Twentieth Century Fox are about to announce a deal that will allow users to rent Fox movies over iTunes. The deal will allow people to download movies that will only play for a limited amount of time. 'Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and cutting out the middleman. "It's just a sign the studios feel ... that another distribution channel is where they are choosing to go, and incrementally it hurts Blockbuster and Netflix," Widlitz said.'"
The agreement will allow rentals of Fox's latest DVD releases by downloading a copy from the online iTunes store for a limited time, the Financial Times said.
One can't rent digital data because an integral part of renting something is returning it at the end of the rental period. Some people get this, and some people don't: http://www.bash.org/?104052 (warning: language).
Yes, I know they mean DRM. This is slashdot, so nobody has to be reminded that DRM is impossible.
I live 5 min from my video rental store. So unless the cost is a lot less, I doubt I would want to wait the longer time for a download.
I'd be willing to spend a dollar or two for a movie, if I could watch it for more than 24hrs. Perhaps a week. In very high quality. Perhaps A dollar or two extra for a movie released in the last year.
Going to an actual video store or even using netflix is just too much of a hassle. The membership. The dues. The fees. The lines. The people. The interactions. The driving. Screw that.
What needs to happen is the half-assed cable "on-demand" services need to have more than a few dozen stupid movies -- all either free or for $7 a movie with only 24hrs to watch them. That's ridiculous. Give me a week to watch something I buy. Drop the price to something more reasonable. And then expand the selection from 200 films to 100,000. I will never need netflix or a video store or to buy an actual DVD ever again. I will always resort to the very affordable (preferably) massive library on my television with the flick of a remote control.
Why is it taking so long to accomplish that? It's 2008...
...on iTunes, there will be at least 2 applications that will intercept or otherwise access the data and convert it to a more permanent format.
Almost certainly it'll be Windows only at first, but very soon thereafter, the Mac OS version will appear.
And then the race will be on! First QuickTime will be patched, then the intercept applications will be patched to defeat the QT patch. The subsequent QT patches will break all sorts of things, like iPhoto and Garage Band and anything else that uses the QT engine.
Hilarity ensues for a year or so until Fox says "Screw it! We're not making enough money off this."
Rest of world pays no real attention, as they're too busy watching all the movies and TV programs they've downloaded via The Pirate Bay and from USENET.
In other words, what we're all doing RIGHT NOW.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
"Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and cutting out the middleman"
This doesnt cut out the middle-man, it just makes the middle-man apple.
Isn't Apple the new middleman?
I an app developer, not a driver developer, but I have seen a few programs, like TrueCrypt fake-out the Windows Driver Architecture into using a driver that isn't associated with actual hardware.
I don't see any reason that this won't work for Video and Sound drivers (until MSFT tries to shove trusted computing down our throats). I have been considering researching the feasibility of/writing a [OSS?] driver that would take the output and encode it directly to disk. This bypasses the need to actually target the hardware itself.
Does it freaking matter what the market share is/will be? All they are asking for is a percentage of it. If the market share is *0* percent, then pay them a big fat ZERO. I can't believe there are still people who can't see through the spin on this.
I won't argue against the anti-DRMists. I'm generally not a fan of DRM, but have also generally gone with the lesser of the evil. I don't buy CDs, because I don't have the room to store them, I don't like destroying the environment, and I don't use CD players anymore. IMHO Apple's DRM tends to be less evil. In part because Apple doesn't really like DRM -- they haven't yet gone out of their way to really screw you over, and generally ignore the hacks around their system. Sometimes they'll fight back, but so far have given in to the end (showing signs of intelligence).
The thing is, I like renting movies. There are plenty of crappy movies I only need to see once. Providing some system that allows me to do that is a great benefit. It means I don't have to walk to the rental place. I can get the movies whenever I want, and I don't have to worry about DVDs that are overly scratched.
DRM is really the only conceivable way to do this. My main worries is that they'll restrict the rental in stupid ways. Like how long per DVD? Is the time based on when you watch it? If not, downloading a DVD is a time-consuming task, and some pre-planning will have to be involved.
I would think a much better system is to do something like Netflix. Forget about amount of time you have the movie, and instead just do number of movies you can have checked out. Also, if they make the rent time too short (and charge the same amount of money) it may in the end not be worth it. Another approach might be to do something like $2/day.
iTunes DRM has not been cracked in ages. The only thing available is QTFairUse and that only works on Windows and doesn't actually break the encryption; it has merely found a hook where it can grab the stream after it has been decoded by Quicktime.
Maybe something like that can be done with the DRM on movies too, but I doubt that any time soon it will be easy and convenient enough for anybody to do to have any noticeable impact on their business. Even if some people crack and share their files, the majority won't.
And the nice thing about rentals vs. purchase is that they can very easily change their crypto methods at a moment's notice without having to be backwards compatible.
Not that I would ever be a customer unless the price is right (it won't be) and they serve up 720p h.264 files at at least 4mbit. (they won't do that either)
After the consumer lashback against DRM in the audio arena forced recording studios to go MP3, Hollywood is pursuing the Bush-style I-can't-be-bothered-with-history fiasco and repeating the same mistakes. Maybe after so many billions of lost revenue, they'll finally figure it out too. DRM is a dead end.
Something that perpetually fascinates me, which presumably relates to the autism of geeks, is that automatic assumption that all media has to be owned and collected: terabytes of ripped DVD material, etc. I assume these are the people who can never actually see a concert, because they spend the whole time photographing and recording it. I own a handful of films of DVD, although I go to the cinema (the ultimate rental, in a sense) once a week. I rent occasional films, that I missed at the cinema, or want to see for some other reason, and after watching them once, from end to end, I'm quite happy not to have them around any more. What do these people with hundreds and thousands of films _do_ with them? I'm increasingly puzzled at what I myself should be with the thousands of CDs I've acquired over the past twenty years: how many of them do I listen to? How many of them, indeed, have I listened to more than once?
Regardless, no matter *how* close your video store--even if you live *in* it, I can start watching a film from iTunes faster than you could from your live-in video store. Hell, I'd bet I can start iTunes, find a movie and start watching it before you can turn on your TV and DVD player, find and load the disc you've already rented, and start the movie (without even taking into account the FBI warning and superfluous DVD startup animations that will delay your movie no matter how fast your DVD player starts).
Which won't work for DRM.
The basic premise in cryptography is keeping the key secret, exchanging them securely with the destination user while avoiding them to be catched by undesired 3rd persons.
With DRM, the problem is that the person to which you securely transmit the keys (the user, so he can watch his movie) and the person you're protecting the keys from (the user, so he won't make unauthorised copies) are the same person. You're supposed at the same time give the keys to the user and prevent the user from using them.
So the mathematical model behind private/public systems, etc could be perfect, that won't help a system like DRM which is broken by design.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why is this exciting or news even?
In the non-iTunes reality, people have been renting Videos online for over 6 years more. Look up Vongo, Cinemanow, Movielink, as well as some of the subscription based music services that also allow limited video and music video downloads.
I like most people in the non iTunes wrapped world have been clicking my media center remote to grab the latest movie online from my chair for a long time now. Yes Media Center 2005 and Vista work great with online Video rental services, it is one of the reasons to pick up a remote for your computer even if you don't use the tuner and DVR functions of media center. (Let alone the online content access to stuff normally found on the old TVLinks sites automatically available inside Media Center)
The only news here is the Fox deal, not the 'renting' of freaking movies, even though it is a new model to Apple.
I know that 'owning' the rights to music is a great plan or getting access to stuff the Windows world has had for years is always exciting to Apple users and they think Jobs invents it everytime, but come on...
As for renting media, I pay my $15bucks a month to Napster or Rhapsody and have access to virtually every song ever made and reload my Creative Zen on a weekly basis with about 1000-2000 new songs. THis also includes loading my Theater computer, and the rest of my family's MP3 players with everything they could even want. How much would that cost in iTunes world?
I guess the part that kills me, is that I have avid iPod and iTunes friends that won't pay for subscription based music, but yet they pay for the deluxe TV/Cable package everymonth or have several XM devices they pay 20-30 bucks a month for, when they oculd be be podcasting and paying a music subscription service cheaper and getting instant access to literally millions of songs as faster as your connection can grab them.
I'm not a personal fan of the Zune, as MS's plans got screwed over by the wireless restrictions, but the model works better. Buy if you want and burn it to CD just like iTunes, or don't and just pay the subscription fee and get access to all their content on a monthly basis.
Consumers are finally taking notice of the 'cable bill' subscription concept and this is driving users to Zunes and non-Apple WMA based devices. Think of it this way, give your kids the option, I can buy you 4Gb Ipod that is cool, but you can only buy 10 songs a month, or I can buy a Windows PlaysforSure or Zune device and for the same money you can download everysong you ever wanted to fill the device.
Kids get the difference here, even if the Apple drones don't. Ipod is cool, but there is the high school and campus crowd of non iPod users that are considered in 'the know' that become more trendy with access to a larger selection of music and videos and movies and TV Shows without having to buy them.
Besides the geeks in the crowds that like the Zens and even cheaper Insigna 4gb players that have better audio support and better video quaility that even the most expensive iPod. Pick up a old Zen M or newer device and not only does the internal screen kill even the new iPods, but the A/V out is DVD resolution giving you a portable Movie jukebox to hook up at any friends house to watch movies on the fly.
I guess the whole iPod thing has left some of us geeks a bit bitter, as we have seen better devices doing what the iPod started years before the iPod, and continue to seen better sounding and more capapble MP3 devices from other companies, but once again Apple's marketing can turn average into spectacular. Maybe instead of bitter, we should just be in awe of Apple's marketing machine and go on our way and buy better quality devices cheaper than iPod with the horrible iTunes lock in 99% of the average users get sucked into.