Apple making deals for Web video rentals
Apple’s sputtering efforts to be a major purveyor of video downloads may get a boost in 2008 from an agreement with Twentieth Century Fox Film for digital movie rentals. Apple has been trying to interest a number of Hollywood studios in an iTunes rental service, and several people familiar with the negotiations said more than one studio would appear onstage at the company’s Macworld exhibition in San Francisco beginning January 14 to endorse a new Apple movie rental service.
Steven P. Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, has been publicly skeptical about movie rentals in the past. Hints that Apple would reverse itself and pursue a digital-rental strategy emerged last month, when a Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate found a series of text phrases in the company’s iTunes software suggesting that components of a video-on-demand rental service were already embedded. It is unclear whether movie rentals would give the company’s Apple TV system a significant bump. Jobs said in an interview last year that the product was a “hobby” because nobody had figured out how to make Internet television a successful business.
Comments are closed.