So the Times (proprietor R. Murdoch) is giving space to story about Fox (proprietor R. Murdoch) allowing it's content to be rented on the best selling portable music/video device ehh?

Did the article also mention Sky and MySpace par chance?

to watch TV? On these tiny PDA screens? For $5?? Absolutely pathetic.

Wake me up when they want to sell something I can use (Linux/Creative user)....

I think Apple want us to buy AppleTVs. After all, it'd be nice if at least someone bought one. And they probably expect their student demographic to watch straight on the computer.

Maybe the fact that they haven't sold well might hint that the prices being charged are ridiculous.

For the amount of money it costs me to buy a series on iTunes, I can buy the DVD boxed set!

itunes is a great beast to play with. My wife and I have spent hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars on various videos via the simple point and click interface.

The problem for us is the lack of being able to re-download something we've bought and then lost due to either human error or a computer going titsup. In my mind, purchasing the rights to view a movie/tv show should allow you to download the item freely for as long as the rights are valid instead of just once.

Up until a crashed external storage harddrive showed us the error of our ways, we were spending $50/week on music and videos. Now that we cannot replace it for free (after all, we did have the viewing rights), we're back to buying dvds and cds.

Whatever the way the pricing system goes for anything I don't believe you'll ever have the option of been able to redownload for free, something you have bought before, that does actually cost loads to the people supplying it.

You can however, I hear phone apple and get a once only redownload of all your stuff if you ask nicely.

cheers Jez Caudle, would have been nice to see a slightly more cynical note from El Reg IMO...

Still, can't please some of the people, all of the time...

or something,

It's unlikely that any service would offer a free re-download, as there's still the cost to supply the things you've bought in terms of bandwidth etc, plus allowing multiple downloads offers up the opportunity to share account details around and let different people use the same download options.

Thinking about it though, it's not like you'd walk into HMV and expect them to give you a new copy of Boyzone if you lost your old one, so there's little difference between digital media and the hard version.

The motto here, as I'm sure you're aware, is keep backups of any data you can't easily replace :)

It isn't exactly analogous, but if you buy software from ComponentSource, you get a free re-download in perpetuity.

I think you need to get a decent PDA.

Buy a game off steam, they let you re-download as often as you need.

And no, I wouldn't expect HMV to replace a lost CD. But on the other hand I wouldn't expect my entire CD collection to go missing the way a single hard drive crash can wipe out an itunes lbrary.

For the price difference, I would rather have the product. Last time I looked at a CD on itunes it was £10 to download ONCE and risk losing, it was £11 to have a CD that I can keep and still rip to my itunes library.

It is nice to be able to get an odd song you like for 79p though.

It's funny how Apple serves up 1920x1080 movie trailers to glorify the power of QuickTime but then sells them at an embarrassing 640x360. I had a computer that could play 640x360 videos 17 years ago.

I can't see iTunes rentals working unless the quality improves a lot. Sometimes you can't tell what's going on in a movie because it's too blurry. Even the old DVD standard offers a 50% higher resolution and it is racing towards obsolescence. That leaves iTunes video as a novelty that you try once then regret. I feel really sorry for anyone who though that an Apple TV was an inexpensive path to HD movies and TV.

ITunes did let my friend re-download her stuff after her laptop was stolen (I'm trying to remember if she had to fax the police report)...one time only deal, and they very, VERY firmly told her to make backups this time. I have three copies of my stuff...iPod, original on hard drive, and hard drive back up... if you have a second authorized computer, you can copy your purchases from your iPod to that second computer.

I totally agree, I have at least two other back-up methods for my itunes content. We have a second authorized computer and disc back-ups for the entire collection, and most things of serious worth on my ipod too. I can't stand people who don't use their equipment properly and responsibly and then start whining when things go wrong.