Certainly Apple could give you more than 24 hours to watch a movie rental. They could even go with a Netflix variant, where you're allowed to have N movies on your box at a given time, new ones downloading when you delete the old ones. That's all a matter of business models and, for all I know, stupid business model patents. I imagine that this 24-hour nonsense comes directly from Hollywood.

Sure they could, but as you say, would those in lala land ever let them? I suppose one day we may see the restrictions ease as we are now seeing with DRM free MP3 downloads. I won't be holding my breath though. I dreading the day that all content must be downloaded.

I'm now wondering if we'll ever see region free Bluray discs. That was the one thing that I thought HD-DVD had right. A region free DVD was a nice thing to have when a better version of a film was available outside your local region. I've got a few region 2 DVDs that I'm glad I was able to play here in the USA. Just breaking down the walls of the tread topic here a bit...

Given that rental downloads from Amazon Unbox to my TiVo have the exact same restriction, I'm sure that's the case.

Not long apparently. The movie will begin playing back once enough has been downloaded. Based on my 6mbit connection, I'm usually able to play back a 20 minute TV show about 15 seconds after the download starts on my Mac Mini. I haven't tried a movie rental on it, and HD movies will likely have a bit more of a delay.


239 movies released on blu-ray are region free, while 113 have region coding. (frim http://www.blu-raystats.com/)

I'm glad the format wars for the HD discs appears to be over, as it's the route I want to go, even with rentals. While download services are handy, they are pretty brutal on the quality to get that movie to fit over pitiful US broadband connections.

Linky

HD DVD: Game Over Toshiba, Blu-Ray Wins

Toshiba plans to stop production of HD DVD equipment and cancel all future development. This comes after Wal-Mart announced on Friday that it would no longer carry HD DVD and would only carry Blu-Ray. This should have been expected all along. HD DVD and Blu-Ray are not a radical change over existing DVDs but an incremental improvement. With technology, the bigger improvement generally wins and Blu-Ray’s improvement is bigger.

...or is this old news?

tanstaafl.

It's not old news, just expected after the Warner announcement in January. Kinda hard to prop up a format with only two movie studios backing it.

Still, the zillion dollar question is whether anybody will care. Do consumers really want super-duper high-def video on shiny plastic discs or do they really want super-duper large video libraries of below DVD-quality standard def?

Apple, Tivo, and so forth seem to have the right idea.