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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.'"
I've only got two concerns with this, and they have nothing to do with 'renting it'. I rent movies from my local blockbuster and so if i downloaded some file and it 'blew up' after X days, I don't care. I have to return the DVDs anyhow.
My concerns are around the following:
-Downloading times. If we were to assume that the quality of the file being downloaded was equivalent to an uncompressed DVD (~4GB), I'm not willing to wait the 8hrs to download it. I'm a comcast subscriber, and the 'on demand' feature should be how things are delivered. Sit down at the tv, scroll to the movie. Click 'pay' and you get it for 24hrs, watch as many times as you want.
-Getting the movie to the tv. I have both a PC and a macbook pro (laptop). However, neither are very good at getting video or audio to the stereo/tv. The Macbook pro had DVI out, but for audio, i have to use a USB to composite (red/white) cable. So even if the media is Dolby5.1, the laptop sends it to my stereo in.. 2channel stereo. While stereos/TVs move towards HDMI, computers are just moving to DVI.
I'll buy into downloading movies if i'm not forced to a) upgrade my broadband connection from cable/dsl to an OC-3, and b) have to replace my laptops with a desktop/mediacenter pc with an optical out/HDMI.
Reminds me of Vista, This is a great OS, if you upgrade to 4GB of RAM and quad core cpus!
I know you're trying to be funny, but if you replace that with the actual business model it sounds a lot more sensible:
"(Almost) no one's ever going to BOTHER cracking the encryption..."
It will all come down to pricing and convenience - if the price is right, and the restrictions aren't absurd, most people will be more than willing to pay to download yet another TV-show-season pack.
Of course, media companies do not have a history of being very smart about either - but the greatest problem is neither with the basic business model, per se, nor with the "online" extension of that. It's just that they keep doing stupid shit with the parameters (price, forced previews / ads on bought content, etc.) so that they not only make it a bad deal, but actively piss off their consumers.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Ok so how would this work exactly?
If I watch the first 30 minutes of a movie, does that count as one full viewing? Does it mark the first 30 minutes as being watched once, so I can watch the rest of the movie X times but I can only watch the first 30 minutes again X-1 times? They CERTAINLY couldn't make it count as nothing, cause then people would never watch the credits of the movie, or whatever, and it wouldn't count.
And, I presume these will sync to video-capable iPods. If you only get to watch it three times, whats stopping me from downloading it, syncing it to my iPod, and then watching it three times on my computer AND iPod EACH.
Ok... so all of the above relies on a method that allows you to watch it a certain amount of times, instead of a method that lets you watch it unlimited times within a certain time period.
I know far less about DRM and encryption than guys like DVDJon, but whats stopping me from changing my Mac's system clock?
iTunes DRM has not been cracked in ages.
Nobody needs to crack it, because iTunes DRM is "honor system": iTunes will happily make a perfect digital unencrypted copy of an audio track for you any time you want, without QTFairUse, by burning to an audio CD.
Which I routinely do every time I buy a track from iTunes, because I took their advice about making backups of all my music to heart. Good thing too, when a couple of reinstalls on a bad system drive took me over the limit of authorizations... it was the only way I could play my music while waiting for them to remove my authorizations manually. If you (any of you out there) haven't made audio CD backups of your iTunes music, I heartily encourage you to start.
Yes, re-ripping will introduce some distortion if you don't re-rip to lossless... but I can't detect any on anything but classical music, and I haven't bought classical music on iTunes in years. I mean, really, if you care about quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs, or at least sticking to iTunes Plus tracks (which are, incidentally, DRM-free).
And the fact that there's not an easy equivalent for video is one reason I've only bought a few TV shows from iTunes, to fill in series I've missed. The video side of iTunes seems like a sideshow, really, music is where it's at.