It seems the internet is abuzz over ThinkSecret.com’s article about Apple announcing iTunes Movie Rentals. Everyone seems to think that the idea of watching full length movies on the iPod is a good one. I however am not one of those people.

Being recently married (married in April) means I also recently honeymooned. And on my honeymoon I had one round trip plan ride. On they way to our honeymoon destination I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the airplane via the airplanes in flight movie system. Though having already seen this movie I still opted to watch it rather than drain the batteries on both my iPod and PSP thinking they might come in handly later in the day as there was at least one car ride to reach our boat (we went on a cruise). However, on the plane ride home I opted to watch videos on my iPod. Now, I had about a three hour plan ride to get home. While my new wife slept I watched episodes of Entourage and Batman Beyond on my iPod. While I made it all the way home with some battery to spare, I wasn’t playing these videos consistently for the entire plan ride. This means the hard drive was not having to consistently spin to access the data which in turn means that the battery lasted a little longer. Watching an hour and half to three hour movie on your iPod means that your iPod needs to spin the drive every so often to load parts of the video into it’s memory cache and the more the hard drive needs to spin the more battery your iPod is going to use up in the long run. There are already reports of people getting poor battery life out of their iPods when watching full length movies they themselves have encoded so Apple knows that this is going to drain peoples batteries quite fast.

Now, the article does not explicitly say that the movie rentals will work on the iPod and instead focuses more of its discussion on the technology and reasoning behind going with rentals rather than downloads so my whole complaint could be completely nulled upon the announcement of the movie rentals, assuming of course an announcement actually happens. ThinkSecret has been known to be wrong from time to time.

[Technorati Tag: Technology]
[Technorati Tag: Apple]
[Technorati Tag: iTunes]
[Technorati Tag: iPod]
[Technorati Tag: Movies]