I can still rent DVDs down the street for $1, and new releases for $1.50. These figures represent a per day, 24 hour rental. And the video store is making money. Plus I can copy/rip & burn those DVDs if I want to; I cannot with Apple's DRM rentals.

I don't see the justification for the huge markup when Apple has no building, no rent, no customer service clerk, no packaging, no shelves to stock, no shoplifting risks, no direct mail advertising, and yet a limited selection.

The video store buys each video once and then rents it as many times as it can before the DVD is physically un-rentable. Apple and other online-rental services have to pay the studios a fee for each rental. And let's be realistic about overhead: Apple has buildings, data centers, bandwidth costs, technical staff, customer-service staff, PR/ad expenses, etc., etc. Just because you don't walk into a physical store and walk out with a physical product doesn't mean there aren't costs. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's costs per rental are actually higher than that of a typical mom-and-pop video store.

(If your local video store is inexpensive and convenient enough that you prefer to use it, great. I'm not saying I wouldn't like to pay less for each rental through iTunes. I'm just saying that it's short-sighted to say that Apple has no justification to charge what it does based on your local video store.)

As for copying the movies you rent, do you really think that an inability to steal -- sorry, "copy" -- the movies you rent is a legitimate criticism of any video-rental service?

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Dan Frakes | Senior Editor, Macworld

I'm not sure why you'd assume that the addition of rentals wouldn't add to Apple costs in regard to bandwidth and servers. More stuff and more stuff to deliver doesn't come without cost.

As for the official record: Ripping DVDs that you've rented, even for personal use, is S-T-E-A-L-I-N-G. If it weren't, why not just bring your laptop into the video store, throw five bucks at the clerk, and say, "Don't mind me, I'm just going to rip these right here. It'll save me a trip returning them?"

Archiving a backup copy that you OWN, is an entirely different matter. For that you could legitimately invoke Fair Use.

The thing is that with rentals there's a lot more content there. You can rent over 600 titles from the iTunes Store. Currently, the majority of those titles are not also for sale. So, Apple's storing more stuff. And because rentals are cheaper than purchased movies plus people tend to favor renting versus owning, far more video content is traveling through Apple's pipes.