Apple, Fox sign iTunes rental deal?

It'll be nice to finally see a reasonable amount of content on iTunes. Way to go Apple; With enough patience and manipulation I'm sure you will contractually entitle yourself to a larger and larger piece of the movie industry's pie.

Entitlement.. well, that's a bit far, but they'll have EARNED that slice. No one else has worked so hard to get an enjoyable, useful, and reasonably priced media model out there. I'm not going to cite details because no one really cares. We're all just happy to be able to rent via the internet.

Now the question is, do we get hi-def, mid-def, or low def? Currently, iTMS gives the basic DVD resolution of a film (usually a tad smaller when you compare to Handbrake rips). Will we get that, or an additional ipod/iphone-sized version to take the video with us? Or, will those with Apple TVs finally be able to put those pixels to use with a hi-def rental version? Each has its own problems when working with full-downloads, esp. for those with slower connections.

My preference would be to get the hi and low-def versions together in one pacakge because what's a couple hundred more megs once you've set your DL for the gigs a hi-def movie will cover. Perhaps we'll see a amazingly simple portable, pauseable streaming service for wifi-equipped idevices, but, correct me if i'm wrong, there's no way you could have streaming for hi-def set up, even with the awesome compression ability.

Rental is one area people would probably shrug off some of the banes of compressed media, since it's only a passing interest. But then again, those who have the appleTVs and have invested in the fancy hardware would prolly want their theatre to look and feel like a theater.

I'd really love to see some more details, MacNN. You're so good at waxing poetic over every little tidbit of info, so I expect to see some soon.

DVD quality is good enough for me, downloading 5+ GB to rent one movie sounds crazy. It will take forever and ruin the experience, rental has to be almost instant. The movie trailers now look very good and start playing almost instantly, perfect.

Now update it into iTV (and a european subtitled service) and i'll buy (sry rent) for sure.

I want to own my music because I listen to the bands I like over and over. I don't want to own movies because I never come close to watching them as much as I listen to an album, so the notion of renting movies from iTunes appeals to me very much. I hope the other studios will jump on board. I presently DL movie torrents, but if I can easily rent one from the iTunes store and take it with me on my Touch when I fly or take a long train ride, I'd gladly pay.

You all are missing the bigger points.

a) apple may finally allow someone to make Fairplay content (although it would be more impressive if they allowed a player to play fairplay content

b) How do they plan on keeping people from just ripping the DVD they have, rather than using the limited and restricted fairplay version on the disc? Or is it just another one of those lame attempts at DRM like they tried with CDs a year and two ago?

Watching Hi-Def movies works great on X-Box 360. After purchasing a rental, it starts downloading it. The entire movie doesn't need to be downloading it, you can start watching movie from beginning to end after about 10 minutes.

If pricing is set at a low enough price point, it'll almost be worth just downloading to watch instead of the rip/compress/wait that you have to go through to get a movie ripped from a DVD.