iTunes Movie Rentals

And so it begins.....

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple and Fox have signed a Movie rental deal.

This pretty much confirms that although 2007 was the year of the iPhone, 2008 will be the year of the Apple TV.

I'm more convinced than ever that one of the primary consumer announcements scheduled for this years keynote in a few short weeks, will be the launch of a new version of the Apple TV and iTunes.

Apple have got to "beef up" the Apple TV to allow direct interaction with the iTunes Music Store from the Apple TV itself. The fact that you'll now be able to rent movies makes this a no brainer.

Movie Rentals may just be the mechanism that pushes the Apple TV past the tipping point to make it the must have Apple device for 2008. If Apple make the Movie rentals High Definition (720p is just fine thanks!), then all those people craving for HD content would have immediate access to a hopefully large collection of movies for immediate consumption. The sales model that Apple have been using with movies can't have been as successful as the music sales model. I just want to watch a movie once and discard, unlike music. I don't want to pay virtually the same amount as a DVD for a lower resolution version of a movie with no extras. It's just not feasible!

Now have a low cost HD movie rental service and I'm there.

I've watched plenty of movies on the Apple TV but the overhead of encoding to Apple TV format just won't wash with most people.

The inclusion of either a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD (or a hybrid) optical disk in the new Apple TV is made more likely by the fact that there is talk of special versions of movies on Studio produced DVDs. These special ipod/iPhone versions of the movies will be pre-encoded and protected by Apples DRM technology so it should just be a matter of inserting the disk into your Apple TV to play back the movie or have it automatically copy the iPod/iPhone version of the movie straight into iTunes for syncing onto your mobile device.

Talking of the iPhone, I've been playing recently with an Airport Express and Remote Buddy software (see this weeks ScreenCastsOnline show to be published on Friday) and the ability to use the iPhone as a remote for iTunes is stunning. Wrap in this additional functionality to Apple TV and not only do you create a much enhanced experience, you also give people yet another reason to buy an iPhone or iPod Touch (as if they needed one). An Apple built remote client developed for the iPhone/iPod touch would be amazing!

How about EyeTVs ability to stream content to the iPhone/iPod Touch from a local web server running on your Mac. Apple are never adverse to copying peoples ideas, so the inclusion of a streaming web server running on the new Apple TV should not be discounted!

But never fear if you're an early adopter of the Apple TV, you can be sure that all the functionality I've described (minus the optical disc) should be able to be rolled out to the current Apple TV via a firmware update - sweet!

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Apple TV, iPhone, iTunes

Comments

[Ian]

Fantastic, movie rentals on iTunes... err... in the UK? Yes, in about two years at double the American price! Everyone in the UK still can't get movies on iTunes and there's hardly any UK TV on iTunes (no surprise it's not taken off here!). I won't hold my breath waiting for movie rentals.

[Don]

Lets not go there Ian as you'll get me all upset ;-(

Yes, I blanked out the UK situation but surely it will get better someday. Perhaps it will be easier to sort out the rights for rentals in the UK than sales?

OK, so I'm an optimist!

[Henrik S.]

You think you guys are left behind? I live in Denmark, and we haven’t even got the iPhone yet.

[Now Steady On There…. at]

[...] Apple TV vII - Gotta happen and with Movie rentals to boot. We might even see the inclusion of an optical drive such as a Blu-ray or Hybrid. Also dual HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. Check out my other Apple TV posts for further thoughts - Link 1 Link 2 [...]

[Don]

So no iPhone remote or Optical drive but I'm pretty happy with the rest of my predictions! Wasn't that hard really :-)