Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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)