After thinking about it some more, I have some real issues with the new iTunes Movie Rentals business model. The mechanics are solid, and the idea of delivering movies through iTunes is a good one, but as with so many things, the devil is in the details:
The Bad (aka "the catch"): you only have 24 hours to watch it once you hit the "play" button. THIS is the problem.
Now I'm the first one to admit I drink Apple coolaid, but this 24-hr business is a poke in the eye with a very sharp, hot stick. I'm guessing it wasn't Apple's idea to limit rentals to 24 hours. It was probably a concession made to get all the major movie studios to sign on. Let's not forget that these are major studios that already have very cozy relationships with brick-and-mortar rental outfits like Blockbuster. So I don't know whether to be mad at Apple for going ahead with this, or be mad at the studios for being such pricks. The reason why I'm so disappointed is because I often take more than 24 hours to get through a movie (you should see how long it takes me to get through a book).
Consider this *very* typical scenario from the real world of video/DVD-rentals: it's Friday night, I'm in the local video rental store with my wife, and we're looking for something to watch that night. We can't agree on which film we want to see so we grab 2 or 3. I choose a movie I really want to watch and my wife chooses one she really wants to watch, and let's say we rent a 3rd that we're both really interested in seeing. We often do this because we know that we can start watching one movie and if we don't feel up for it we can switch to another one and finish watching the 1st one another night. The key here is "another night". Not the next morning/afternoon within a 24hr period. When we rent DVD's we have up to 7 days to return them. That's 168 hours! And guess what, sometimes that's how long it takes to finish what we started.
I understand that there has to be a time limit in the above scenario because we're renting a physical product and other people may want to rent it and they can't until we return it. But with downloads, there is no physical limitation to the number of copies that Apple can "rent". So why limit the rental by time? Why not limit it by number of plays? Can someone responsible for this absurdity please come forward to answer this question? Because frankly, the current solution does not make any logical sense whatsoever. And when everyone else realises this, there will be an uproar and consumers will not embrace it, they'll ignore it. And that would be bad for both Apple and the studios.
Update: The plot thickens, or gets more complicated anyway. The folks over at Engadget have put together a great chart that reveals that movie rentals are not quite as straightforward (or transferable) as Steve Jobs had everyone believe during his keynote address. The game changes whether you rent/download via iTunes or AppleTV. Oh, and it doesn't work with previous-gen iPods, and none of this applies to Windows PC users. They get nada. Hrm...
