AppleTo Redefine Online Rentals

Boston (dbtechno) - Apple Inc. spent much of the last ten years totally redefining how the distribution of music online developed. Now, they are poised to possibly do much the same thing to online movie rentals.

Apple and 20th Century Fox Studios plan to bring movies to the popular iTunes format. Using its family of phones and media players, Apple seems uniquely poised to make such a huge step come to pass.

The deal with Fox has not been made totally public as yet, but it appears that some sort of deal is in the offing for movies that are in the Fox Studios control will be made available over the network system of iPods and the iPod family of phones for a limited period of time time. The movies that are released by Fox Studios on DVD would be released to Apple for distribution.

The idea of online film renting and the purchase and downloading of movies and film content online is still a relatively new concept. NetFlix and Blockbuster Companies, respectively, have been the main purveyors of mail order and online film distribution.

Others that are eyeing the online marketplace for movie distribution include Amazon.com and TiVo. The two have launched their own partner deal to let the owners of TiVo recorders to be able to download, rent or purchase movies and select Television programming using the Unbox video system by Amazon.

Studios Paramount, MGM, Universal and Warner Brothers are all working toward a possible movie distribution online sharing plan with a company named Movielink. Movielink was recently purchased by Blockbuster

Still others in the marketplace have abandoned online movie distribution altogether. Wal-Mart decided to close down its online download service and did so last week, on December 21st.

The jury is still out, it shall be interesting to see if Apple can make this work. If not, it will be a serious stumble for a company that seemingly has made a lot of right choices in the last several years.