Some time ago, the Screengrab reported on Apple's freshly announced streaming movie rental service. At the time, we noted that it was overpriced, clumsy, and a classic example of valuing the rapid dissemination of computer technology over the actual value of that technology to the consumer. We predicted that whoever was the winner in the upcoming war between Apple and Netflix for streaming video rental, the consumer would likely be the loser until the bullheadedness of the studios over digital rights management was overcome.
We don't want to pat our own backs or anything, but it looks like we called this one. The program was always going to stand or fall on the strength of the movie library both services were able to offer, and as C/NET and many other sources are reporting, Apple's service, which had promised a library of over a thousand feature films by this point, is substantially short of that goal, offering between 300 and 700 titles depending on how you reckon the figures. Netflix offers several thousand rentals, but a large percentage of the titles are dross — low-rated TV shows, sports specials, mediocre documentaries, and direct-to-video releases. And neither service is setting the world on fire in terms of popularity.
As tempting as it would be for Mac-haters to cite this as Apple's first major blunder after a string of successes, the blame can't be laid completely at their door. The reluctance of studios to license their films to either service due to control-freak issues regarding rights management has prevented huge amounts of material from finding its way into the rental libraries of either service, which problem, combined with high cost and user-unfriendly technical requirements, is what cause Wal-Mart to shut down a similar service last year. Regardless of how well or how poorly such services are set up, they're likely to go nowhere so long as they can't license the content people want — and that means illegal downloading will continue to plague the studios. Feedback loop, anyone?