Financial Times Reports Apple Has Online Movie Rental Deal With Fox

Matthew Garrahan and Kevin Allison, reporting for The Financial Times:

Apart from letting people rent online, Apple will also for the first time extend its FairPlay digital rights management system beyond its own products.

A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in new Fox DVD releases, enabling film content to be transferred or “ripped” from the disc to a computer and video iPod. DVD content can already be moved to an iPod but this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.

Rentals are the sweet spot for online movie distribution; if they can get a large library of titles, I’d drop Netflix. Sounds like The Financial Times’s source is someone at Fox.

★ Friday, 28 December 2007