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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.'"
No one's EVER going to crack the encryption algorithms so that a temporary movie becomes permanent! It's BRILLIANT!
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?
Film at eleven.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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!
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.
How many decades have to be spent on reinventing ways to amuse ourselves? Holy crap! Being a stockholder of Apple I'm pleased the stock is growing. As an engineer I would rather see advances at Apple getting into the traditional Engineering Fields with products that can expand their reach and make OS X a leader in the Auto, Aerospace, Bio-Medical and more fields.
Oh never mind! Trek 69 was just delivered to my AppleTV.
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).
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.
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.
The limitation you are experiencing is because you are using the Quicktime player, instead of iTunes (or Front Row, if you have a Mac). Yeah, it's dumb, but you really wouldn't use Quicktime (player) to send it to your TV when you have the option to do it from iTunes (especially if you bought/rent it directly in iTunes). It's especially irrelevant if you use OSX and Front Row....or an Apple TV for that matter.