Apple to start “renting” TV shows for $0.99

A lot of people expected the Apple TV to get a substantial update at WWDC this year. Rumors that were circling at the time included a complete form factor redesign, a lower price point of $99.00, and an iTunes based cloud that would support the system. All pretty lofty expectations at the time, and still rumors continue to come up around the internet.

Here’s the latest: Instead of selling television shows for $1.99, Apple might be considering a rental fee of $0.99 per episode for a series. That would be pretty exciting news, considering consumers would no longer have to pay for storage space to save their shows, since this rumor also suggests that television shows would stream to users much in the same way Hulu and Netflix currently stream.

I’d be all for it. It makes complete sense in my ecosystem, and adopting the change would be pretty easy for me. I binge on televisions shows, and rarely do I watch them on a week to week basis. Instead, I wait until a series makes its way to DVD, and then I watch all the episodes at once. At $0.99, I’d be a lot more likely to stream my shows to a television than I would with the current ecosystem. Heck, considering I watch two or three series a year, I could probably do away with cable television altogether and take back a ton of shelving space.

Actually, now that I think about it, what does Apple have against shelves these days? First they put all my books onto a digital device, and now they want to do the same with my DVD and television collections.

Maybe that iconic Steve Jobs photo that we’ve grown to admire is foreshadowing where Apple’s heading in more ways than one.  I won’t start worrying until they start making ornate lamps.

Article Via NewTeeVee

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio