'iTunes Replay' to Allow Movie Redownloads and Streaming?

I'm a Blu-ray fan, but I can kind of see where Apple wants to go with all this. The thing is, online video is hopelessly hobbled by the studios insistence on DRM and all that nonsense.

And yes, you never 'own' a film or album or story when you buy a DVD or CD or book, but you do tacitly buy a perpetual license, whose terms are settled once you've paid and they hand over the physical media itself (which you do own).

The difference with online media is, especially when DRM and streaming are involved, they can change the goalposts any time they feel like it, and you'd be stuck.

"Plays For Sure" don't play no more.

Not good if its separating your media into eligible and non-eligible content. Makes it just like the problems of dealing with DRM as users are expected to know what is and isn't going to work on that device.

Why would I deal with such limits and nonsense when I can just download a movie off torrents?

iTunes' DRM free music downloads are excellent, I think Apple should fight to have this on TV Shows, too.

Today I was tempted to do my first TV shows purchase: Full season pass for Breaking Bad Season 4. In the end I was put away by the DRM (and the fact that many users are reporting that full season pass results in episodes not being available for downloads days and weeks after they are released on iTunes)

Why should I go to work at a job to make money when I can just rob a bank.

So, at what point do we "Own It" after we buy it? Sounds like it follows in the footsteps of "Unlimited".

Websters better get busy updating it's dictionary.

The idea of only being able to download a show 5 times for a lifetime is laughable. If I ever do download something and it hits the 5 times, limit, I will be right back on the torrent site downloading it in seconds.

So ridiculous.

I have NO ISSUE paying and even paying a high amount for the content....but spare me this "only 5 locations" garbage.

So, at what point do we "Own It" after we buy it? Sounds like it follows in the footsteps of "Unlimited".

Websters better get busy updating it's dictionary.

You can still download it to your devices, and you still "Own" the TV show in question. This just gives you the option to re-download it to any of your devices (or in the case of the Apple TV, stream directly to the device.)

You can still download it to your devices, and you still "Own" the TV show in question. This just gives you the option to re-download it to any of your devices (or in the case of the Apple TV, stream directly to the device.)

5 times.

Why would I deal with such limits and nonsense when I can just download a movie off torrents?

One reason would be one of legality. Not always something certain people like to think about but still the truth. There was a time back in the day when downloading all and sundry might have been 'cool', but those days are gone and people still doing it are seen as freeloaders, hogging bandwidth, causing tighter regulation, and destroying jobs. And before the over used altruistic 'it's all about sharing'. Then do something really worthwhile and start 'sharing' your apartment with the next homeless person you meet, or your laptop, bank account, car .... Doesnt quite have the same appeal does it?

Just let me rent a movie for more than 24 hours and I'll be happy. I don't buy movies, but often times I won't get to finish watching a movie in one night and then it's impossible to finish watching it the next day unless I start watching before I started the day before. They should make all rentals 48 hours. Once you have paid, why should they care how long you have it. 48 hours seems far more reasonable and it's still just renting.
I think they should also have an option to grab it again up to a week later for a Dollar. Then if you don't get to finish watching in the 48 hours, you can pay a little extra to grab it again and watch it. The movie industry needs to loosen up like the recording industry finally did and we will all be much happier.

For the money that Apple charges here in Germany for movie "rentals", you can usually buy the DVD from Amazon and OWN the movie - including subtitles and the original audio track and everything at a superior quality than those inferior DRMed iTunes rips. It doesn't surprise me at all that iTunes movies are not a real success.

As long as downloadable content does not come in BluRay quality and is more expensive than a used DVD, the industry should not be surprised at all that people prefer downloading movies from Internet torrents. You'll get the best quality WITHOUT DRM, WITHOUT annoying "FBI warning" screens and in all available languages and with all subtitles in a matter of minutes from the torrent networks.

The movie industry would be smart if they just threw their stuff on the Internet for one or two dollars a piece or for a flatrate fee that will allow you to donwload as many movies as the studio owns - and without DRM, of course. Even in that scenario people would still pirate movies because you simply cannot stop piracy, but the studios would have a least some additional income that they would NOT have otherwise.

It's the digital age. People don't want to "RENT" movies for a ridiculous fee. Whatever you can download, you want to own. Storage space is cheap. And you want to copy the downloaded content to whatever device you own, without any copy protection ******** in your way.

You know, back in the good old days of TV and VHS everybody recorded whatever they wanted from TV and stored the VHS tapes in their shelves at home. People collected their favorite movies or TV shows -- and the producers did not have any additional income from this channel either. But apparently, that system still worked for the industry, because the TV stations had to pay some fee to get a license to broadcast the stuff and then charged the "sponsors" for the ads. Or collecting some money from the GEZ here in Germany. It was okay for everybody.

Now why don't they just put their entire catalog on some servers and charge a small fee for access to those servers like above? Stupidity and greed are the only two possible answers that I can come up with. The industry cannot increase their income by waging war on possible customers. And they certainly cannot be successful by charging cut-throat prices for stuff that I can get in better quality for free by downloading it from other sources.

It has already become impossible to sell DRMed but legal music, and it is also impossible to sell music online that costs more than the physical CD. The book market is about to follow the same route and you will soon see that authors will find out that they no longer need a big publishing house. It's only a question of time until the movie industry will have to seriously rethink their online strategy as well. The old distribution channels no longer really work, most people don't even want to go to a movie theater anymore, and they certainly don't want to be pestered with ads and legal threats when they pay good money for a physical medium.

But then again, maybe it'll take another twenty or thirty years for them to change -- until people who grew up with the Internet and understand it are in charge of the studios. Or whatever is left of them by that time.

So, at what point do we "Own It" after we buy it? Sounds like it follows in the footsteps of "Unlimited".

Websters better get busy updating it's dictionary.

You never "own" it... You licensed to use/listen/watch.

When you purchase and download an application you don't own the application, the developer does, what you do buy is the right to use that application. Same goes for other forms of content.

When you buy a book, you own the physical book, not the story written within. When you buy a CD, you own the physical disc, not the music on it, etc.