There’s been a lot of speculation in the news lately about Apple’s desire to get into the video downloading business. It started last year when they started selling downloads of TV shows, but they’ve never actually been able to offer more then a handful of films for sale on their site.

One reason why the studios have been so quick to license TV shows, but so slow to license films is that with the widespread adoption of TiVo and other PVRs, the studios have come under increasing pressure to create new revenue streams on the broadcasting front. Meanwhile, the rise of Walmart and the success of DVD sales have made studios reluctant to jeopardize their DVD revenues by offering a compelling low cost VOD solution. It’s a tough balancing act for the studios to maintain, but thus far they’ve been reluctant to cross the line between films and television without huge licensing fees and cumbersome copyright restrictions.

Recently, it was reported that Apple had gotten stuck in their negotiations with Hollywood over wanting to charge a $9.99 fixed price for all movies, compared to the variable pricing that the studios want. Studios typically like variable pricing because their standard M.O. is to spend a lot of money on marketing all and once in order to earn as much as they can from a film before dropping support for it and moving to the next flavor of the week. While this is remarkably effective at driving demand to the most popular films, it does little to create demand for longtail titles that people have forgotten about. Because of this, they want to be able to charge more when demand is the hottest and then use a lower price to help continue to create demand once a film has been moved to archived status. When Apple balked at the variable pricing, the whole idea of iMovies was put at risk, but Think Secret is now reporting that Steve Jobs is moving away from the idea of paid downloads and instead is set to launch an Apple rental service in August.

“Apple is said to have ironed out agreements with Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros., and is currently in talks with other major movie studios as well. It’s unknown to what extent content will be available come the August 7 announcement, or whether Apple will announce all of its studio deals at that time.”

Details are still sketchy and it’s worth pointing out that this is still a rumor, but the service would either have restrictions related to the number of times you could watch a movie or it could have a time period that you have to watch it in. If this does turn out to be the direction that Apple is heading with their VOD, I would think that it would be a mistake. In today’s digital age, consumers don’t want to have to rush home to watch a movie before it expires, nor do they want to have restrictions put on what they can do with their content. A much better solution would be for Apple to adopt something similiar to Napster’s subscription music program. For one monthly fee, they could allow consumers to download as many movies as they want. Make the films portable to laptops, digital video players and TiVo/Media Center and you’d have a real hit on your hands.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was the second album I ever purchased. The first time I took it home I remember putting it into my CD player and being very disappointed by the fact that it was only 40 minutes long. I listened the the album once and then didn’t touch it again until I got into college and took it out one day on a whim. Since then this has been one of my favorite all time albums. What it lacks in length it makes up for in pure brillance.

Perhaps the most interesting part about the whole album is it’s synchronicity with the Wizard of Oz. You have to start the album right on the third roar of the lion, but if you watch the movie and listen to the album at the same time, it’s almost as if the two were written for each other. It’s a very cool effect and worth checking out. Someone has posted the Dark Side of Oz to Google Video and I still find the synchronicity creepy. Mad Dog In The Fog has listed his highlights as the following “coincidences”

1) 8:07. The wicked witch arrives at the exact same time that the bells go off.

6) 19:31. The sounds of the cash register start after Dorothy opens the door and the movie switches from black & white to color.

These are all great, but my personal favorite coincidence is that right when Dorthy’s house gets picked up in a tornado an instrumental starts and ends as soon as she goes from black and white to color. The name of the instrumental is “the great gig in the sky.”

Movielink has pretty much been a flop from the get go, but we are finally starting to see signs that the company might be innovating. A lot of people have suggested that Movielink was designed to fail from the beginning. That the site was nothing but a shell that Hollywood could point at to show that they were embracing digital downloads and that Congress should put their foot down on Bit Torrent and other file sharing sites. Earlier this year, there were rumors that Hollywood was trying to unload the service and that Blockbuster Video might actually buy the service, but those talks suppossedly broke down after Blockbuster insisted on the rights to burn on demand technology and Hollywood balked at the deal.

This morning, Hacking Netflix points to a report by Video Business that the studios might be ready to change their tune when it comes to burning DVDs on demand. While this will help to solve the problem of getting digital downloads to the TV set, I don’t think that this will be the eventually winner when it comes to VOD. The problem with even a burn on demand solution is that only a small population of potential customers even have DVD burning capabilities to begin with and then they have to go through a number of steps in order to get a copy of that disc.

Given some of the preliminary pricing that iTunes has talked about, I just don’t see consumers paying $10 – $20 dollars to download a film, then burn it using their own equipment and then watching it on the big screen. By the time that you go through all of this hassel you are better off waiting for Netflix or driving to Blockbuster to pick it up. I may end up being wrong about the success of this service, but until I can easily and inexpensively order VOD directly from my set top box, I don’t see myself adopting VOD.