Thus far, Amazon Unbox and Netflix Watch Instantly have been the online movie rental leaders. Well, according to Evan DiBiase, the latest version of iTunes hides a little surprise. iTunes 7.5 contains strings (rental-content, rental-bag, source-rental-info, dest-rental-info, etc) related to video on demand rental functionality! This would be a great addition by Apple and would certainly make sense for their iPod and AppleTV products. (via TechCrunch)
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It sure would make sense, and I’ve been hammering Apple on this point. I wonder if they’ve had more luck negotiating favorable rental terms with the studios? That 24 hour standard is a bit short… 36-48hrs would give folks more flexibility. If they combine this with on-box AppleTV ordering they could immediately kill Vudu. They may anyway…
Isn’t Steve Jobs the board chairman of Pixar, Disney, ABC, ESPN and Touchstone? Those will be “favorable rental terms”
Dude, this was reported 2 months ago on appleinsider, among other places. Unless there’s some new info, yer kinda late, or just regurgitating.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/09/08/apple_itunes_glitch_reveals_movie_rental_preparations.html
Damn, you’re right – it’s a repeat or re-discovery of stuff uncovered earlier. I even linked to it in Sept. Guess our memories aren’t as good as we thought (and the movie/music rental rumors/speculation have been never-ending).
I never saw the July mention of this but you are right. Looks like the actual strings in this version are new and different than before however. To me, it just confirms everyones suspicion that rentals are on the way from Apple.