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Will Apple's rental service succeed?

Steve Jobs' keynote at this year's MacWorld included the announcement of four new products: the new MacBook Air, Time Capsule, an update to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and a revised Apple TV with movie rentals through both the Apple TV and the iTunes store. It's clear that Jobs is excited about the new offering and the studios are also quite pleased with the terms of the new service, but what about John and Jane Consumer?

At the new iTunes rental store, visitors can check out movies from all of the major Hollywood studios. For new releases, users are charged $3.99 and catalog rentals are $2.99. HD rentals were also introduced this week at $4.99, but are only available through Apple TV. Once downloaded the movies will remain accessible for 30 days, but will only stay active for a 24 hour period after pressing play.

In 1987, the Dead Kennedy's released an album titled " Give Me Convenience, or Give Me Death," and for those who live by that credo, the new iTunes service delivers hands down.… Read more

Move over Netflix, VOD services; here comes Apple

Quickly filling up Netflix's rearview mirror is a sight that no tech company wants to see: Apple.

Apple announced on Tuesday that the company has cut licensing deals with every top film studio--deals that will enable iTunes to offer first-run movies a month after they are released on DVD.

This means that Apple has won a major advantage in the Web movie-rental business. One of the biggest complaints customers have with online movie services is that none offer first-run features. The same is true with some of the video-on-demand services operated by the cable companies.

Moreover, Netflix offerings don't work … Read more

Netflix battles Apple by eliminating online-watching limits

UPDATE: Netflix made its official announcement on Monday morning.

In an attempt to counteract whatever announcements Apple will make at Macworld this week, Netflix has decided to let subscribers stream unlimited movies and TV shows, with almost every basic plan, the Associated Press is reporting.

Currently, subscribers can watch anywhere from 5 to 48 hours a month, depending on their plan, although I don't see how anyone could be on the "eight-at-a-time" plan. (My two-at-a time plan came with 14 hours.)

The new, unlimited plan will be available to all subscribers, except for those on the two-rentals-per-month … Read more

More details about the super-secret Netflix set-top box are revealed

The long-anticipated set-top box from Netflix is headed toward your living room this summer, according to several major news providers including the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Reuters. The good news is that unlike the optical supremacy battle going on between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the capability to tap into Netflix's movies-on-demand service could become a standard option on many upcoming consumer-level DVD players and set-top boxes as an added feature--not the sole purpose. Boxes equipped with the Netflix service (including the purported next revision of LG's flagship BH series of dual HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players) will … Read more

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data

Correction: The authors of the Netflix de-anonymization study contacted me to point out that they originally published a draft of their results a mere two weeks after Netflix released its dataset. Netflix has known about their study for over a year.

Over the past year, there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which sensitive user data was accidentally revealed to the Internet at large. As a result, I believe that high-tech companies will never again share anonymized data on their users with academic researchers, at least not without requiring contracts and nondisclosure agreements. For the users and privacy … Read more