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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'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
You do know that your macbook pro has digital optical audio which will send dts surround don't you?
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.
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.
What are you talking about? Every Macbook/Macbook Pro has audio OPTICAL OUT. It'll do 6.1 DTS.
Don't blame the hardware if the problem is that you don't know how to use it.
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).
The movies already available on iTunes are in the 1-2GB range, similar to DVD quality (slightly lower res than progressive DVDs, but a more efficient video codec (H.264 vs MPEG-2)), and will play immediately after the download starts. So as long as your bandwidth is faster than the bitrate of the video file (limited to 1.5Mb/s for the iPod, which is only a fraction of the bandwidth of cable internet), you can start watching the movie immediately.
As for getting it to the TV, that's what the Apple TV is for. Unfortunately, the Apple TV currently doesn't support streaming movies directly from the iTunes store. This seems exactly like the sort of thing Apple would update for a rental service like this.
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.
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