Appletell

With Apple’s recent changes to the App Store, I was honestly afraid that I wouldn’t be able to provide a long list of free apps and games for you to try out this weekend. If you’ve noticed, Apple removed the All Apps section the App Store, which provided users with a great way to see all of the newest apps to drop.

But thankfully, I was wrong. I still found a nice long list to clutter up your home screen.

Get this week’s list after the break.

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When announcing iTunes Movie Rentals, Steve Jobs said to expect 100 High Definition, 5.1 Surround Sound titles available for rent by February.  Although Apple has made this goal, they are really short in their goal of 1,000 standard definition titles.  396 short, to be exact. Although there are 197 HD titles, of which exactly 100 are 5.1 Surround Sound, there are a relatively meager 604 SD titles.  Also of note is the fact that only six (yes, only six) titles have been added to the content library since March.

This may seem very un-Apple to set a seemingly attainable goal and miss by a mile, but they managed to do so.  If Apple ever wants to be a substantial competitor for Amazon’s Unboxed or Netflix’ Instant Watch, both of which have thousands of titles (it is still pretty foggy on whether or not Apple is really actually trying to compete with those two companies). 

Via [iLounge]

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) admitted Wednesday that their study on illegal movie downloads had a serious flaw.

In a 2005 study, the MPAA accused college students of being the cause of 44% of illegal movie downloads, mostly because of easy access to high bandwidth networks at the colleges. The MPAA used the study to put pressure on colleges to stop illegal filesharing and back a legislation that would do the same.

But now, the MPAA says that due to human error, they got it wrong. Now college students are only responsible for 15% of illegal downloading, which the MPAA is quick to say is still significant and still justifies the crackdowns schools have been taking against illegal downloads.

An Associated Press article points out that about 80% of college students live off campus, so college campuses are most likely liable for only about 3% of losses, so the crackdowns won’t and haven’t really been working.

The MPAA has said that it will hire a third party to re-validate the math of the study.

Read [Globe and Mail.com]
“Calvin and Hobbes” © Universal Press Syndicate

The iTunes UK store may not be the farthest behind in terms of content, but it is still behind the US store. We haven’t got movies at all yet - let alone movie rentals. Hopefully that will all change some time this year, when we receive the movie rental treatment. The lack of Apple TV sales in the UK was probably because of the lack of content from iTunes itself. Once the UK store receives movies - I’m sure sales will increase.

The UK store has recently been updated with some more video content including:

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Many think that the iTunes Movie Rentals have too strict time limitations. You only get to watch your movie for 24 hours once you have started playing it. Clever hackers have developed a simple loop in Apple’s system, which allows you to rent movies, and keep them with plenty of time to watch them. The hack has to do with you changing the time of your computer’s clock.

Set your computer clock to the year 2009, begin to play the movie, and then set the clock back to 2008. You will then have one full year to watch your movie instead of a measly 24 hours. This is very handy if you need more time to watch the movie. This hack is a major oversight in Apple’s movie rental DRM, and will most likely be fixed in an upcoming iTunes verion.

Via [Ars Technica]

Along with rumors of Fox partnering with Apple for movie rentals this morning, rumors of DVD copying have risen as well. Apple’s infamous DRM system, FairPlay, will be used to allow the copying of Fox DVDs to iTunes, iPods, iPhones, and AppleTVs. Although users have been able to copy DVDs and import them for a while, a one click system would be easier and faster. Hopefully, other studios will hop on board if this is a success. All will hopefully be unveiled at the Stevenote.

Via [Valleywag]

While trying to report a problem in iTunes, Mac developer David Watanabe stumbled upon what could be the beginnings of movie rentals on iTunes. When browsing the reasons you could submit problems under, he discovered some unusual strings, and posted a screenshot of them on Flickr. Among them were: “DidNotReceiveMovie-Renjavascript:promptTag("link");talMovie," “AccidentalPurchase-RentalMovie,” “ContentQuality-RentalMovie,” “DuplicatePurchase-RentalMovie,” “WrongVersion-RentalMovie,” “BadMetadata-RentalMovie” and “Other-RentalMovie.”

It has been rumored for a while that Apple might begin to rent movies on iTunes, as it has been a much-requested feature. Whether these strings actually end up meaning anything, is still up for speculation. Engadget has claimed that these strings have since been removed, though when I went to check for myself, I was greeted with an iTunes prompt stating that “The iTunes Store could not process my request at this time.” Let me know if you have any better luck.

Via [AppleInsider]

This year, Netflix released an instant viewing service for Windows which allowed you to watch movies on your PC (Windows). Netflix provided customers with a certain amount of hours per month depending on your subscription.

Netflix has just promised to release this service for Mac. The service is expected to launch sometime this year.

Via [Ars Technica]

One of my biggest ‘issues’ with the iPhone is the limited disc space. 8GB just isn’t enough to get me remotely interested in one. If I had one though I would be looking at Blade Runner as a means of squeezing every last MB out it to.

Although it wont work with the DRM videos purchased through the iTunes store it will work with video you encode with applications such as Handbrake, Visual Hub etc and can be set to a number of options: 100, 200 and 350 Kbps and 480 pixels width, with varying levels of quality as you would expect. Is it worth it?

Well even at 100Kbps the claims are that the video is watch-able so “as the movie encoded at 1500 Kbps and full resolution weighs in around 1.5GB, but using these newer settings knocks the file down to around 190 MB (for the 100 Kbps file), 300 and 400 MB, respectively. That means you could easily fit anywhere from three or four movies (at the highest quality 350 Kbps setting) to as many as six movies (at the lowest 100 Kbps setting) in the same space as the original high-quality version.”

Via [TUAW]

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple may be in talks with Hollywood movie studios about launching a movie rental service via iTunes.  A film would cost $2.99 for a 30 day rental, and its Digital Rights Management (DRM) software would allow it to be moved from a computer to at least one other device such as an iPod or the soon to come iPhone.  Movie rentals seem to be the next logical step in getting the Apple TV - and the computer in general - into more living rooms.

At one of Apple’s shareholder meetings, Steve Jobs was asked the question about movie rentals via the Apple TV.  Steve’s reponse was “One never knows.”

One thing that I’d like to see is a subscription service like Netflix or Blockbuster’s TotalAccess that gives you all-you-can-eat access to the movie library.  Now I don’t think we’ll be seeing this service popup at today’s Steve Jobs WWDC keynote, but maybe we’ll see it at next year’s Macworld?

Read [Financial Times] Via [MacRumors]