Movie Rentals Go Digital - Xbox Live and Apple TV

These aren’t the only companies that have their feet in the downloadable video waters these days. Microsoft has video downloads through their Xbox 360. There are almost 18 million Xbox 360s out there already, so the possible market is huge. HD new releases cost $6 while the standard definition costs $4. With 20 GB of hard drive space, the console will run out of space quickly, with HD movies ranging from 1.5-2 GB in size.

Apple has the iPod, which dominates the MP3 player market. They have added video support for the iPod Classic and iPod Nano. The iTunes store also supports videos. Apple has already put their name into the online video rental basket. They have had their Apple TV device out for a while. I think the big picture option will be a PC extender, such as the Apple TV. The biggest online music store hasn’t parlayed its advantage into the dominating video force at this point. Apple TV also hasn’t been as great a seller as Apple wished. The $299 price tag might have something to do with this.

As I said in the introduction, I also rented video games from the video stores. All the companies I have talked about so far have only done videos and no games. Don’t worry, there is a company out there that does online game rentals, called Gamefly. Similar to Netflix, you have a paid subscription and you get a certain number of games at a time. It’s a very nice program since games cost up to $60 and once you beat it, you tend not to want to play it as much.

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