According to reports, Apple is planning on offering movie rentals via iTunes. Apparently, these will be $3.99 for 24 hours.
What a crock.
Apple seems to forget that the 90s are over. Selling a rental for a specific time, downloaded or not, is competing with video tapes and Blockbuster. Who the hell want that model? The world has moved on. Between Netflix in the US and Lovefilm (and others) in the UK, I can’t imagine anyone with a brain going for this.
What Apple should do is offer a subscription service, just like Netflix. I.e, iTunes has three, four, or x number of “slots”. You pay a set fee per month, variable with the number of slots you want. I.e., $10 gets you three slots.
When you rent a movie, iTunes downloads it from the store and it fills one of your slots. You can sync it to your iPod/iPhone or your AppleTV or watch it right from your computer. Rent the next one and it fills your second slot. When you’ve filled all the slots, your rentals go into a queue.
When your done watching a film, click a “Return Movie” button next to a slot and iTunes deletes it from your computer, iPod, and/or AppleTV. Then it downloads the next film in your queue.
I’ve been a [Lovefilm](http://lovefilm.com) customer for a while. I can’t imagine going back to being forced to watch a movie in 24 hours.