Apple Drops TV Rentals from iTunes

In only Tim Cook’s second day as CEO of Apple, the company has gone ahead and gotten read of a service. That’s right. Apple has done away with TV rentals through iTunes removing the option entirely and leaving only the ‘Buy’ option or for some content, a ‘Season Pass’ to view a whole year of shows.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise though. The service has really never taken off with the masses and it has become clear the customers are more inclined to buy an episode rather then rent it.

And it wasn’t just customers that had lost interest, content providers like Fox had become disillusioned with the idea as well. In a statement, Fox stated that: “After carefully considering the results of the rental trial, it became clear that content ownership is a more attractive long-term value proposition both for iTunes customers and for our business. To further enhance the value of ownership, we are working with Apple to make content available within their new cloud-based service.”

So, if you’re headed to iTunes tonight to try and pick out some content to watch, you’re going to have to buy it. But once you do, you’ll be able to use Apple’s cloud services to watch it wherever and whenever you want (iPhone, iPad included) which makes the loss of rentals much easier to bear.

And just for show, here is what rentals looked like yesterday courtesy of AllThingsD:

And here is what it looks like now:

To be honest, I’ve never rented a thing from iTunes. Anyone out there going to miss the service?

Via: AllThingsD