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Upcoming Apple TV will push .99 cent rentals

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 09 Jul 2010 1:45 User comments (2)

Upcoming Apple TV will push .99 cent rentals

According to sources cited by NewTeeVee, Apple is looking to take the unpopular Apple TV set-top box to the next level, bringing TV episode rentals down to .99 cents, half the current pricing model on iTunes and elsewhere.
Apple is currently trying to get TV programmers to drop the price on rentals, with mostly everything else remaining the same. Once purchased, consumers have 30 days to watch the video with rentals then expiring 24 hours after you start.

What will be different, besides the pricing, will be that episodes will now be streamed, within the cloud, and not downloaded, following the broader industry trend led by Netflix and Hulu.



Although still unconfirmed, the upcoming Apple TV is said to use iOS 4, the operating system used on the iPhone. It will also use flash memory, moving away from the HDD seen in the original model.

Because the device will ship with (likely) under 128GB of flash memory, downloading makes little sense when streaming can be done efficiently.

Apple's iTunes platform remains the clear market leader for music and movie/TV downloads, so Apple should have significant clout with content producers whilst trying to get them to drop the price of rentals.

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2 user comments

19.7.2010 08:28

"Apple is currently trying to get TV programmers to drop the price on rentals, with mostly everything else remaining the same. Once purchased, consumers have 30 days to watch the video with rentals then expiring 24 hours after you start. "
-Wait...they are trying to get the price down to $1 per day to rent a 22-minute piece of material? ...And right now they charge $2 for this? $1 should buy me the episode, permanently. I can rent a whole movie, on a disk, for that price!

"Because the device will ship with (likely) under 128GB of flash memory, downloading makes little sense when streaming can be done efficiently."
And when streaming can't be done efficiently, it will be like watching hulu on dialup! Then again, if it does have a "overnight download" feature, you could probably download a lot of stuff to 64GB flash; at least if it was all in iTunes's ultra-lossy format. Oh, and don't think you are going to Hulu to get your TV; Apple doesn't do flash...or bluray...or quality antennas...I honestly don't know what Steve hates about good antennas, but he has been very vocal about the other two things.

If this device were hacked so that hulu worked, it might be worth about $100...but I've got a feeling that no one will make such a hack before this thing crashes and burns, and that apple will charge more than $100 for it, at least at first when they know they can sell them to the apple addicts that will buy anything with an Apple logo.

29.7.2010 14:33

Rack that take!

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