Apple announcing movie rentals?

Written by Wil Harris

July 18, 2006 | 16:12

Tags: #download #drm #film #movie #music #rental #steve-jobs #store

Companies: #apple #netflix

Will Apple announce movie downloads at its World Wide Developer Conference? That's the word on the wire today.

The gossip is that movies will be available to download from the iTunes Music Store very soon. However, these won't be in the same kind of format as the current music and TV downloads, where you pay a price and can watch and listen as much as you want.

Current thinking says that the movie downloads will be, in some form, rentals. Either you will be able to watch a movie a number of times, or it will be available to watch for a certain amount of time.

We're not quite sure how this will be handled with video iPods - presumably they'll need a firmware update to manage whatever DRM is embedded. So far, Apple has been relatively fair about the limitations and restrictions on its pay-to-play media, although most would rather have none at all, obviously.

Would you rent movies over the net? Given the popularity of NetFlix, it seems that quite a few of you might. Whilst we might not pay $10 to have a permanent copy of a lower-res, DRM'd movie on our system, wouldn't you pay a dollar to have a new release to watch once or twice a la BitTorrent?

Let us know your thoughts over in the forums.
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