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Apple and Fox Set to Announce Movie Rental Deal
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 28, 2007 01:26 AM
from the why-is-renting-data-a-good-idea dept.
from the why-is-renting-data-a-good-idea dept.
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.'"
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Entertainment: Netflix and iTunes Rentals Aiming At Different Crowds 166 comments
Engadget notes an article in the New York Times discussing the substantially different markets that Netflix and Apple's movie rentals are aiming for. The site views the loosening of Netflix streaming restrictions as a reaction motivated entirely by the iTunes movie rental announcement, but beyond that the two services seem to have little connection. From Engadget's observations: "After speaking with Netflix's Reed Hastings, it was found that the vast majority of its streamable content was 'older,' and considering that users of this service can never look forward to brand new releases being available, the cost (i.e. free to most mail-in subscribers) makes sense. As for Apple, it's able to focus on crowds who are looking for a more robust, generally fresher selection, but of course, you'll pay the premium each time you indulge. Furthermore, Netflix has yet to make transferring video to any display / device other than your monitor easy, and while an LG set top box is indeed on the horizon, the differences in content selection are still likely to lure separate eyes."
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What a great business model! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What a great business model! (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Fairplay is "honor system" DRM (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At least the XBox service is evidence the studios are not totally opposed to HD at a decent bitrate, there may be hope yet.
Now all we need is a good box to play them on - I don't want a noisy '360 that I would not use for games anyway. A proper HD Apple TV 2 would be good - so lon
Re:What a great business model! (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely! I also heard that two companies are being formed, called Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, that will actually try to rent out temporary copies of movies using a protection scheme that involves the customer giving the movie back before the end of the rental period.
What idiots! They must think it's impossible to make a permanent copy of the media before it's returned! Don't they realize that virtually everyone will simply do that in future?!
I give both companies six months before they fold.
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Cryptographic model (Score:5, Insightful)
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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can't rent (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [bash.org] (warning: language).
Yes, I know they mean DRM. This is slashdot, so nobody has to be reminded that DRM is impossible.
Re:can't rent (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:can't rent (Score:4, Informative)
Just a point on the Amazon service. I've used it with my Tivo, and the prices are really good. Actually, I just opened another tab to check the current prices, and ended up renting Transformers for $0.99 and Waitress for $1.99. Most of the rental* prices are around that. The really nice thing about Amazon's downloads is that it's just the movie. While this means no special features, it means no previews and no annoying menus getting between you and the movie.
*And yes, I said rental. Semantic arguments are teh lame.
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A week after the first rental film goes live... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lawbreaking != immorality.
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Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and the Boston Tea Party was wrong. So was the American Revolution. We should *always* do what the government demands. Always.
Your kind will soon enough be naturally unselected.
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Re:A week after the first rental film goes live... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem will be getting the movies to where people want to watch them (ie, the TV). Fortunately, Apple has the Apple TV for just that.
The iTunes music store was easy enough, cheap enough, and the DRM was unobtrusive enough, to convince a *lot* of people already "doing that RIGHT NOW" to actually *buy* music again. Then they did the same with TV shows (until NBC/Universal decided they'd rather have people "pirate" their shows instead of buy them through Apple). There's no reason to expect the iTunes movie rentals will somehow fail to do the same thing, again granted acceptable pricing and usage terms.
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apple is the middle-man (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesnt cut out the middle-man, it just makes the middle-man apple.
Cutting out the middleman? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't Apple the new middleman?
Media outlet repeats rumor from media sources (Score:4, Funny)
Film at eleven.
Bandwidth and the TV (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Bandwidth and the TV (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Bandwidth and the TV (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Bandwidth and the TV (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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What a total freakin' bore... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh never mind! Trek 69 was just delivered to my AppleTV.
Re:faster to go to the video store (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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Re:faster to go to the video store (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Re:faster to go to the video store (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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