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Apple and Fox Set to Announce Movie Rental Deal

Posted by Zonk on from the why-is-renting-data-a-good-idea dept.

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.'"

14 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. can't rent by Erpo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:can't rent by edwardpickman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not entirely true. You can rent services and things like bandwidth that has no physical form to return. It's semantics when you get down to it. I guess it could be called a Limited Use Purchase but the intent is to function like a rental. I'd prefer this over the play once or twice disks that have been tried once before. That really was pointless and a rediculous waste of landfills. It was like trying to commercialize those America On-Line trial disks. All we need is more trash to throw out after we use it once. There are benefits to no physical media. The problem is most of these services try to charge nearly the purchase price of the DVD itself. I think Blockbuster is over priced so why would I pay $9.99 for essentially the same thing only with a higher compression? Yes it's more convient but price will be the decider. I don't personally mind the pricing for iTunes but if they try the $10 crap I'll never use the service. They may not want to compete with DVDs and threaten those but unless it's less than Blockbuster rentals I can't see using the service. I checked out Amazon's service but they were $10 and wouldn't play on my Mac. No thanks. If I wait a couple of months I can buy a used copy at Blockbuster for that and it'll play on any of my machines. At $10 it's a novelty at $2.50 I think a lot of people would be interested. I don't agree with the everything should be a $1 approach but when I'm not getting a physical media I think under $3 is reasonable. If they decide to offer full 1080P I'd be happy to pay $10 for a 48 hour rental but not for an over compressed copy.

  2. Re:faster to go to the video store by Seumas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  3. A week after the first rental film goes live... by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...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!
    1. Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... by theurge14 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For every geek who uses Pirate Bay, Usenet, etc, there's about 20 people at my work who see my video iPod and ask "where do you get TV shows and movies for that thing?" Those are the people who will be paying for this service.

    2. Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There will also be those moral enough not to break the law.

      Lawbreaking != immorality.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    3. Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... by skeftomai · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, and the Boston Tea Party was wrong. So was the American Revolution. We should *always* do what the government demands. Always.

      Your kind will soon enough be naturally unselected.

    4. Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... by node+3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In other words, what we're all doing RIGHT NOW. People "all doing that RIGHT NOW" with music, but Apple has no problem selling billions of songs on iTunes. I don't think movie rentals, provided the price and DRM terms are reasonable enough (like they are with music on iTunes) will be any different.

      The biggest problem will be getting the movies to where people want to watch them (ie, the TV). Fortunately, Apple has the Apple TV for just that.

      The iTunes music store was easy enough, cheap enough, and the DRM was unobtrusive enough, to convince a *lot* of people already "doing that RIGHT NOW" to actually *buy* music again. Then they did the same with TV shows (until NBC/Universal decided they'd rather have people "pirate" their shows instead of buy them through Apple). There's no reason to expect the iTunes movie rentals will somehow fail to do the same thing, again granted acceptable pricing and usage terms.
  4. apple is the middle-man by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

  5. Cutting out the middleman? by MtHuurne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and "cutting out the middleman."

    Isn't Apple the new middleman?

  6. Re:What a great business model! by daBass · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

  7. Re:faster to go to the video store by igb · · Score: 3, Insightful
    And yet strangely a lot of people spend money with Netflix, Amazon Rental, etc, etc. I believe there is a video store near to me, but the Amazon rental service is priced so low I don't care and works fine. It also has a rather wide range: I'm guess the set of video stores with a copy of Nuit et Bruilard to hand is small.

    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?

  8. Re:faster to go to the video store by node+3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I live 5 min from my video rental store. 5 minutes from the moment you decide to watch a movie to being back at home watching it? Or 5 minutes from leaving the driveway to parking the car at the video store?

    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).
  9. Cryptographic model by DrYak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We already have mathematical algorithms that are good enough (both deterministic and 'uncrackable')


    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 ]