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Filed under: Internet, Video, Apple

iTunes movie rentals coming soon?

Watanabe iTunes movie rentals
The thing about rumors is that they often turn out not to be true. But even in this day and age of Photoshop, somehow if you put a pretty picture in front of us we're more likely to believe it.

So while we've reported several times before that Apple is on the verge of launching a movie rental option to the iTunes store, this time we really really (almost, kind of) mean it. Mac developer David Watanabe says he was trying to report a problem to Apple when he noticed some interesting options in the error reporting service -- that seem to indicate a movie rental service will be coming soon.

Specifically, he found options to report that he had not received a rental, had accidentally purchased it, that the content quality was subpar, etc.

Considering Apple has been significantly less successful at selling videos on iTunes than music, and considering the fact that the company faces pretty stiff competition from services that offers movies for sale and rental, this rumor has the ring of truth. Even if Watanabe's screenshot is fake, we're still going to go out on a limb and predict that Apple will offer movie rentals... eventually.

[via Engadget]

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Apple

iTunes movie rentals

apple itunes movie rentalsApple is rumored to be launching iTunes movie rentals. The news will apparently be dropped by none other then Steve Jobs at his Keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on August 7-11th.

Think Secret has said that Apple has deals with Disney, Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. studios to rent out videos, and not sell them. Since the videos will be purchased for rental only, they will be electronically date stamped with time encoding, or play encoding, only allowing users to view the video a certain number of times, or by date, having a certain time frame users can watch videos for.

Apparently Apple was trying to get the studios to shift towards the buy-the-movie-electronically idea, but the studios were highly set on only offering a subscription only, or rental type structure through iTunes.

The new service is said to work through Guba, an online entertainment destination that lets users share, upload, download, and browse video.

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