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.'"

What a great business model!

[by Anonymous Coward]

No one's EVER going to crack the encryption algorithms so that a temporary movie becomes permanent! It's BRILLIANT!

Re:What a great business model!

[daBass (56811)]

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)

Re:

[dabraun (626287)]

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)

Why not? XBox has been doing this for over a year (720p at something like 12mbit) - it's VC1, but obviously Apple's format of choice would be H.264 for the same scenario. This isn't exactly revolutionary - it's not even new. Amazon has online movies, xbox has them, movielink has them, cinemanow has them ... so Apple's joining the game too. Apart fro

Re:

[daBass (56811)]

I did some googling, and of all the ones you mention, it seems only XBox Live Video is HD (720p) and at a decent bitrate. The others are SD in 700-1.5Mbit, which simply is not good enough. (Amazon is 2500kbps average, but still SD)

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

Fairplay is "honor system" DRM

[argent (18001)]

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.

Re:

[node 3 (115640)]

No one's EVER going to crack the encryption algorithms so that a temporary movie becomes permanent! It's BRILLIANT!

If it's cracked (which will be *extremely* difficult--don't think that just because DVDs are so easy to decrypt that that means all DRM is futile), Apple will just update iTunes and FairPlay. At worst, there will be a window of time where rentals can be de-DRMd. You won't be able to all of the sudden "rent" a ton of movies and decrypt them, because by the time it becomes cracked, the new FairPlay (which is certainly already prepped) will be in place, so any new rentals will not be crackable via the already

Re:

[Bodrius (191265)]

I know you're trying to be funny, but if you replace that with the actual business model it sounds a lot more sensible:

"(Almost) no one's ever going to BOTHER cracking the encryption..."

It will all come down to pricing and convenience - if the price is right, and the restrictions aren't absurd, most people will be more than willing to pay to download yet another TV-show-season pack.

Of course, media companies do not have a history of being very smart about either - but the greatest problem is neither with th

Re:What a great business model!

[squiggleslash (241428)]

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.

Re:

[jcaldwel (935913)]

I an app developer, not a driver developer, but I have seen a few programs, like TrueCrypt [truecrypt.org] fake-out the Windows Driver Architecture into using a driver that isn't associated with actual hardware.

I don't see any reason that this won't work for Video and Sound drivers (until MSFT tries to shove trusted computing down our throats). I have been considering researching the feasibility of/writing a [OSS?] driver that would take the output and encode it directly to disk. This bypasses the need to actually target

Cryptographic model

[DrYak (748999)]

We already have mathematical algorithms that are good enough (both deterministic and 'uncrackable')

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.

can't rent

[Erpo (237853)]

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 [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

[edwardpickman (965122)]

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.

Re:can't rent

[hmccabe (465882)]

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.

Re:

[Mikey-San (582838)]

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

So you don't pay full price and can watch it for a few days or some other period of time. After that, you aren't allowed to watch anymore without paying again. Everyone who isn't a Slashdot pedant calls this "renting a movie". There's nothing wrong about describing it as a digital movie rental service, because that's just how customers are goin

faster to go to the video store

[Jeff1946 (944062)]

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.

Re:faster to go to the video store

[Seumas (6865)]

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...

Re:faster to go to the video store

[igb (28052)]

And yet strangely a lot of people spend money with Netflix, Amazon Rental, etc, etc. I believe there is a video store near to me, but the Amazon rental service is priced so low I don't care and works fine. It also has a rather wide range: I'm guess the set of video stores with a copy of Nuit et Bruilard to hand is small.

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?

Re:faster to go to the video store

[node 3 (115640)]

I live 5 min from my video rental store.

5 minutes from the moment you decide to watch a movie to being back at home watching it? Or 5 minutes from leaving the driveway to parking the car at the video store?

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).

A week after the first rental film goes live...

[Chris Tucker (302549)]

...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.

Re:A week after the first rental film goes live...

[theurge14 (820596)]

For every geek who uses Pirate Bay, Usenet, etc, there's about 20 people at my work who see my video iPod and ask "where do you get TV shows and movies for that thing?" Those are the people who will be paying for this service.

Yep...

[Joce640k (829181)]

The vast majority of people simply can't grok emule, don't know what to do when Windows Media Player doesn't recognize a file, etc., etc.

If you can make it simple for them you'll make money.

Re:

[ConanG (699649)]

For every geek who uses Pirate Bay, Usenet, etc, there's about 20 people at my work...

Holy crap! Where the hell do you work? There's got to be millions of people at your workplace!

Re:A week after the first rental film goes live...

[Daniel Dvorkin (106857)]

There will also be those moral enough not to break the law.

Lawbreaking != immorality.

Re:A week after the first rental film goes live...

[skeftomai (1057866)]

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.

Re:

[Cal Paterson (881180)]

Morals != Law.

In Saudi Arabia, the law is that homosexuals be put to death.

Not everything your government says comes straight down from heaven.

Re:

[mrsteveman1 (1010381)]

Morality isn't going to change the market. When these companies are willing to sell what the public wants, they will win. The public in general wants easy to use, accessible music and movies, without the unnecessary locks, for a reasonable price.

Until then all the morality you can preach won't change a thing.

Re:A week after the first rental film goes live...

[node 3 (115640)]

In other words, what we're all doing RIGHT NOW.

People "all doing that RIGHT NOW" with music, but Apple has no problem selling billions of songs on iTunes. I don't think movie rentals, provided the price and DRM terms are reasonable enough (like they are with music on iTunes) will be any different.

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.

apple is the middle-man

[by Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:

[mosch (204)]

It cuts out a lot of people.

No pressing discs. No printing boxes. No shopping finished product to distributors.

There's still a retailer involved, but a bunch of other middle-men are removed.

Cutting out the middleman?

[MtHuurne (602934)]

Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and "cutting out the middleman."

Isn't Apple the new middleman?

Media outlet repeats rumor from media sources

[Infonaut (96956)]

Film at eleven.

Bandwidth and the TV

[HockeyPuck (141947)]

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!

Re:Bandwidth and the TV

[bizard (691544)]

You do know that your macbook pro has digital optical audio which will send dts surround [digitalmedianet.com] don't you?

Re:Bandwidth and the TV

[Swampash (1131503)]

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.

Re:

[lakeland (218447)]

Use the digital audio output on your macbook, it sounds GREAT!

Cables are pretty cheap too, at least not too bad

Re:Bandwidth and the TV

[node 3 (115640)]

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.

I wonder how long

[hyades1 (1149581)]

it's going to take somebody to crack the time limit and make it possible to keep the movies forev...oh, never mind. Some little smartass just did it.

I need a DFD

[michaelmalak (91262)]

'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.'"

Either Stacey is full of it, or I'm missing something. I need a DFD (dataflow diagram).

How is iTunes cutting out the middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be the new middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be

Re:

[edwardpickman (965122)]

Actually there tends to be more than one level of middleman and some want a big piece of the pie. Say with a theatrical release the studio makes roughly 50% of the box office based on a sliding percentage. Something like 60% the first week then dropping to 50% then gradually dropping from there so the theaterial gets a bigger piece of the pie as the numbers drop. Some one like Walmart of Blockbuster are going to negoiate for a very big piece of the pie compared to smaller distributors. The small retailers a

Don't Read Manuals

[abes (82351)]

I won't argue against the anti-DRMists. I'm generally not a fan of DRM, but have also generally gone with the lesser of the evil. I don't buy CDs, because I don't have the room to store them, I don't like destroying the environment, and I don't use CD players anymore. IMHO Apple's DRM tends to be less evil. In part because Apple doesn't really like DRM -- they haven't yet gone out of their way to really screw you over, and generally ignore the hacks around their system. Sometimes they'll fight back, but so

What a total freakin' bore...

[tyrione (134248)]

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.

audio DRM failed, now they try again

[peas_n_carrots (1025360)]

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.

Re:

[Mikey-San (582838)]

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.

Listen, I think DRM is a failure, too. But this post is crap.

1. There's no consumer backlash against audio DRM on a large scale. 1+ billion songs sold through iTunes proves this. Conusmers may like DRM-free s

Re:

[node 3 (115640)]

Right, because people will be honest and "return" their rented iTunes movies on their own, without any need for DRM to enforce the rental terms.

Clue 1: Audio DRM is different from Video DRM. Clue 2:People have already fully embraced Video DRM via the DVD.

How would the limited-use DRM work?

[DTemp (1086779)]

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?

DRM and Limits

[VincenzoRomano (881055)]

movies that will only play for a limited amount of time

Which should mean proprietary file format and player?
A good bait for hackers to circumvent it.
As stated previous postings, DRM is an illusion, renting digital files doubly so.

No mention of late fees

[DTemp (1086779)]

What happens if I fail to scp them their movie file back within a timely manner? 99 cents a day?

Why is this exciting or news even?

[TheNetAvenger (624455)]

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.

Re:

[the_B0fh (208483)]

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.

Re:

[stewbacca (1033764)]

This is a common complaint. However, with iTunes content and/or anything put into Apple's Front Row software, even though it uses the Quicktime video codecs (and the Quicktime player itself doesn't play full screen unless you go pro), the video content from iTunes and video played via Front Row, indeed DOES play full screen.

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