Wednesday, December 26, 2007 -- 9:26 p.m. -- at my desk

Here's a report from the Financial Times, that, if true, would be huge for the movie portion of the iTunes Store.

The paper reports that Apple has made an online deal with Fox that would allow for movie rentals with Fairplay DRM through the iTunes store.

According to the paper, the agreement will allow consumers to rent the latest Fox DVD releases by downloading a digital copy from iTunes for a limited time.

It goes on to report that the deal will likely be announced at Macworld on Jan. 14.

Obviously, this would mean more movies on iPhones and iPods -- not only more available movies but more people likely to pay a lesser sum to rent a movie than a larger sum to buy one.

When you have a 160GB iPod, you can afford to keep a few movies on there. But when you have an 8GB iPhone, you can't keep movies just lying around. I've blogged before and have said that if I could pay $4.99 to rent "An Inconvenient Truth" as opposed to $15.99 to own it, I'd go for it in a second. I'm willing to pay a little more for that privilege and I'd bet that millions of iTunes users would feel the same way.

So add this to your list of potentially big announcements at Macworld and get ready to watch more movies on your iPhone.

I'll keep you posted as things develop.

And here's a link to the full article at the Financial Times.

Thanks for calling.

Even better are the prospects that you could download them in H (although, that would take a week and a half at my current plain, old DSL that AT&T will never get around to allowing for faster downloads because they hate me until I die) and even better, if I buy a Fox DVD ( which since I do not rent movies, I usually buy a DVD) you can rip it to iYunes without using Handbrake (and taking a week as well).

SCOTT'S REPLY: If the information is correct, it's a matter of simple ways for consumers to get it from here to there. That's what you can bet Apple is pushing the movie studios on -- Steve Jobs doesn't release anything to the Apple masses if it's not easy.

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