I thought I’d leave you for the weekend with some thoughts on Apple’s announcement this week that it is going into the online movie rental business with a rental service that will be available from the iTunes movie store. As a customer of Netflix, I have to say that I love the service and that this announcement doesn’t, in any way, jeopardize my Netflix membership. The group that this is great for is business travelers and other people who find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time on planes, trains and in airports. Aside from that, this announcement doesn’t excite me because it doesn’t allow me to have a transportable medium that I can play on my television. I was talking with someone yesterday about Apple and how they are the kings of re-tooling existing technologies and services and making you feel as if something they do is the first of its kind. Sometimes it works (iPhone, iPod) and sometimes it doesn’t (AppleTV). I may very well rent a movie if I am traveling sometime soon, I think the price points are pretty much right on ($2.99 for older titles, $3.99 for new releases) but I would be shocked if anyone not traveling decided to sit in front of their computer at home for 2 hours to watch a movie when they could just as easily rent it from an actual store.

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