Move over Netflix, VOD services; here comes Apple
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Apple has taken the online movie rental business to a new level by signing deals that enable iTunes to offer first-run films.
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New device plays back audio and video on the go, but it sports a hefty price tag.
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Apple's new video-rental service requires a late-model iPod or iPhone, customers have discovered. Video rentals from iTunes won't play on iPods that predate the latest models, released in September 2007.
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Christopher Breen  takes us on a tour of Apple TV that begins with downloading the software update and ends with the big questionââHowâs it look?â To which Breen responds, âDarned good.â After renting Live Free or Die Hard. Breen reports that â the picture is great on my 42-inch Panasonic plasma display. With a digital audio cable connected to my AV receiver the movie caused the receiverâs 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio light to glow and the resulting sound was bigger than anything Iâve heard come out of the box previously.â
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The company makes another move to compete against video on demand.
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During his Macworld 2008 keynote Tuesday, Steve Jobs announced what everyone knew was coming: iTunes movie rentals. An update to Apple TV was also unveiled.
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Rumors are abound that Apple will release a movie rental service on iTunes. And as Don Reisinger points out, the company should do it as soon as possible.
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Everybody's buzzing about the new iTV set-top box and movie downloads. But iTunes' new visual navigation scheme is the real winner. Commentary by Leander Kahney.
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By MAY WONG  SAN FRANCISCO - Seeking to further push digital media into homes, Apple Computer launched its long-awaited online movie service Tuesday and showed off a device that will make it easier for consumers to watch the videos on television.
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Apple TV remains âa fantastic way for people to get their iTunes-purchased movies, music and TV shows from their computers onto their living room TVs.â And now âwhatâs even betterâ about Apple TV Take Two, concludes Jason Chen (Gizmodo) âis that it doesnât require a computer to function. People can plop down an Apple TV into their homes and rent movies, listen to iTunes music, sync up with their grandchildrenâs Flickr or .Mac streams, or just waste an hour surfing YouTube.â
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Apple is set to unveil at MacWorld San Francisco a groundbreaking deal with News Corp.'s Fox movie studio to rent movies through Apple's iTunes store, news reports revealed Thursday. If true, the news could impact the landscape for on-demand movie rentals dramatically.
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They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either. AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections." Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it. Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill. They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.  Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power! Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.
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Next month, Apple TV owners will have the option of watching all that user-generated video has to offer on their big-screen TVs.
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By Adrian McCoy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  Jan. 28--Good news for couch potatoes: Netflix and Blockbuster are  battling to be at the forefront of movie rentals, offering services to keep up  with increasing requests for on-demand entertainment.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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Steve Jobs' keynote address to WWDC 2007 attendees can now be viewed as a video on demand using QuickTime.
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Apple is playing its usual, tight-lipped corporate self, but ultraslim MacBook tablets, movie rentals, an Apple TV renewal of some sort, HD content and ditching plastic cases for aluminum also look to be on the docket.