iTunes Movie Rentals

ThinkSecret.com is reporting that Steve Jobs will announce iTunes movie rentals. Rumors always are plentiful this close to WWDC (the Apple World Wide Developers' Conference).

This would certainly be an interesting model - downloadable rentals. Not sure how I feel about this yet. My two concerns with the whole movie download model is time and quality. When I watch a movie I want as close to a real movie experience that I can afford. That means widescreen and DVD quality. I'm having a hard time imagining a movie at DVD quality taking less than at least an hour to download. Probably not something that will be practical for me, especially for movies I want to own. However, I'm probably willing to sacrifice some quality for convenience for movies I want to rent.

I doubt that they will announce this during the WWDC. I could rather see Apple announcing this at a special event or something. I think the focus at WWDC will continue to be Mac OS 10.5 - Leopard. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Although you never know - no one expected Intel-based Macs back in January either.