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Wednesday January 30, 2008
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Apple's non-replaceable-battery policy forcefully nudges its users to upgrade their hardware every two years or so. Now they're discovering that unless they purchased an iPod after September of last year, the newly introduced iTunes movie rentals aren't for them.
Thus far Apple has yet to respond to the outcries that are current filling up the company's forums, beyond a standard PR response: "Movie rentals work on iPod classic, iPod nano with video and iPod touch."
There's a glimmer of hope in the firmware upgrades that gave iPhone and iPod users increased functionality, which was issued after the same keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the movie rentals. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Apple will most likely not be supporting older models with this new service, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Wired spoke with an analyst from the Yankee Group, who added that incompatibility with older models may have been imposed by movie studios (who Apple is likely to try to appease, given increased competition in the space and its much publicized falling out with NBC):
This was almost certainly a requirement imposed by the movie studios, he concludes. Indeed, some users recently discovered that by setting back the clocks on their PCs, they could temporarily extend the duration of their iTunes movie rentals, and movie studios probably wanted to limit their exposure to that hack.
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January 30, 2008 9:21 PM
Unless this was a condition imposed by the studios, I think Apple's missing out on a fairly good sized revenue stream from those of us who own 5g / 5.5g iPods. I have been waiting for a rental service since I got my 5.5g iPod in Dec 2006. There was no way I was going to buy a video from Apple for $13+ when I was just going to watch it once. The rental model was ideal, especially for travelling. As much as I'd love to upgrade to a Touch, I'm just not going to plunk down $300 so I can watch some videos, especially since I lose about 90% of my storage on the device.
Long story short: I hope you're wrong, too, Brian, but I also suspect you are correct.