Eventually, the selection will grow to encompass Wii, PlayStation 3 and PS2 games, which will compete directly with the likes of Blockbuster ($9 for five-night rental) and the recently launched GameFly kiosks, which were first spotted on the Texas Tech campus in February. [Redbox blog via Zatz Not Funny - Thanks, Dave]

Its location is top secret and its building disguised; its employees are mostly female, and unusually old; its atmosphere is silent, and its decor depressing ("a hasty mismatch of promotional posters taped to its walls like college dorm decor — a poster for Atonement alongside a poster for the direct-to-video Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief.") Workers start at 3am, and do calisthenics throughout the day, presumably to help circulation, and to distract them from the fact that their customers are insane. That's why the center's address cannot be divulged, ever—people would apparently endlessly insist on dropping their DVDs off there, like it's a Blockbuster—and why the workers' near-mechanized jobs sound bearably interesting:

Customers stuff things into the envelopes. Scribbled movie reviews, complaints, pictures of dogs and kids.

How charming! Full account at [The Chicago Tribune]

For $10, Blockbuster is offering a Summer Escape Pass. Each is good for a week and offers unlimited rentals of movies and video games. The catch, of course, is that you can only rent one movie or game at a time. But if you live across the street from a Blockbuster or something, you could make a lot of trips to the all-you-can-watch media buffet. [PRNewsWire via OhGizmo! and image]

According to the Video Hits rental agreement, if a movie is not returned within seven days of the due date, the customer will be charged the full retail price for the DVD along with all late fees. For those who failed to pay, the owner filed paperwork with the justice of the peace to have some customers arrested for theft of services. According to Texas law, this is an appropriate course of action so long as the proprietor of the business sends a certified letter to the customer and gives them 10 days to return the movie.

In the end, some customers paid fines of up to $870 while others were arrested by the constable. While I understand that this guy has a right to protect his business, I can't help but wonder how he is still in business in the first place. Needless to say, the folks in Wylie Texas need to look into this little thing called Netflix. [Dallasnews]

The story broke when one of Sony's infamous questionnaires breached the topic of a subscription download service, and now another report from develop supports that "Sony was informing various studios of the new rental service at GDC [Game Developers Conference]...providing info and documents in closed-door meetings."

A subscription plan on the PSP just sounds doomed for failure (though the $50 yearly price is about the same as Xbox Live), as no one wants to be locked in to monthly contracts for a single (portable even!) system that has a mediocre selection of games to begin with. Then again, if the price is right and the selection is expansive...well, we'll be interested to hear what Sony eventually rolls out. [Kotaku and develop via Electronista]

Unsurprisingly, the kiosks run Windows, as seen in this follow up spy shot:

[Thanks, Mark]

And even if the loan keeps going it still not "may not have sufficient liquidity to finance the ongoing obligations of our business, which raises substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."

So, uh, who didn't see this coming? Unlike Circuit City though, this doesn't exactly make me sad. [MSNBC via Technologizer, Image CipherSwarm/Flickr]

They're $20—yes, about as much as a Blu-ray—and they'll pop up as the usual $5 HD rentals within 30 days after that. It kicks off with Quantum of Solace and Twilight for pre-order, with Transporter 3 (Jason Statham, YES) and other blockbusters available right now.

HD movies are pretty hefty—about 2-3x bigger than standard def, running between three and four gigs, and then you get a bonus file on top of that, the iPod- and iPhone-compatible standard-def version—so I hope you've got some sick NAS storage for these whoppers. But is $20 really worth it? [Apple]

Blockbuster is testing offering games now, and planning to offer it to customers in the second half of this year. Netflix has made no noise on the subject, and judging by the fact that it promotes Gamefly in envelope ads, probably doesn't have immediate plans to jump on board.

There's no word on the pricing of a movies-and-games package at Blockbuster, but they did mention half-priced game rentals in-store, so that could be nice. [Hacking Netflix]

Zipcar users will be familiar with the process: book any available car at any time, get its location via text or email, wave your RFID membership card by the door to unlock it. Inside you'll find iPod connections and GPS standard, with a variety of fleet options to choose from ranging from "Personal" to "Jet Set." Fees break down with a monthly contract commitment of $50 a month, with per-hour rates anywhere from $8.50 to $12 depending on your plan.

It's only starting in NYC this week (and also running in London and Paris), but expansion is in the cards, of course. The Hertz folks also say they're working on one-way rentals that allow you to drop off the car at your destination, which is something Zipcar can't do. [Hertz Connect]

The plan is to have a fee of about $10 a month as well as a free device, but the pilot test in the Dallas area will only work with Archos players. Individual movie rentals will be $3.99, but if you're going to have to go down to the store AND pay about the same amount for a movie as you do already, why not just rent a DVD? [Hollywood Reporter]

Update: Looks like we heard about this before. Well now it's official.

iTunes Movie Rentals launches today and will offer over 1,000 titles by the end of February, including over 100 titles in stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound which users can rent directly from their widescreen TV using Apple TV.

All in all, that's 601 movies short of their 1,000 title promise. As for "100 titles in stunning HD," Apple fell short here as well, but they at least came close offering 91 films that meet the standard (however, many of those films are not actually in 5.1 surround).

And when counting all the movies you can watch from iTunes—including both rentals and purchases—Macworld found that Apple is still short of any 1,000 movie goal, offering only 770 films total.

Hopefully, Apple will meet their 1,000 rental goal in March. Because while AppleTV's recent makeover was impressive, we'd like to be able to, you know, watch some movies on it or something. [macworld]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Yesterday we rented 300 and started playing it only 5MB into the download—it was fast and smooth. Very nice. But now I've only got 9 hours left to experience the magic. With time running out, I closed iTunes, set my clock back and restarted the program to see if it does bestow a Lazarus effect. Sure enough, it did. I even got a little mad with power here, turning the clock back to 2003 to see just how potent this elixir is. iTunes yelled at me:
But when it started back up, check it out: That's right. iTunes knows I was playing God and messing with time on a massive scale. But I got three years to watch my movie anyway! Unfortunately, this trick does not work to revive already dead flicks—once they expire, they're automatically dumped. I know, because I launched my computer forward in time by a day and got this:
So, this is a great way to extend the life of movie rentals by a couple of hours if you're running late on finishing it, but it's not really a practical way to steal movies, since your would have to live in the past every time you fired up iTunes.

Another idea was to set the computer's time up before we rented, thinking you could then set it back to normal and have as much time as you wanted. Being adventurous, we tried to set the clock ahead 50 years. The homemade XP Pro computer we used in testing wasn't built for serious time travel, however. The 50-year shift made everything go kablooey. So we tried the more modest jump of one year. It worked.

Giz-Certified Best Method
Take your system into the future (but not too far) before you click play for the first time, which starts the 24-hour clock. Start the movie. Then exit iTunes and return to the present. We did this with the second movie we rented, playing it for the first time in 2009. We came back to 2008, and now we have a whole year to watch it. This method obviously doesn't require as much careful time-shifting back and forth to extend your movies' life span as it does if you start playing around after you've started the 24-hour countdown. Mac Test
We figured it would work on a Mac, but wanted to be absolutely sure, so Benny Boo gladly dropped $4 (which we may or may not reimburse) to test it on his MacBook. As you can see, it works: The bad news is that it doesn't seem to work with iPod/iPhone, however. Benny's year-long rental is apparently too much of a time paradox for the iPhone to swallow, so it kept spitting it back up despite a restart and repeated attempts: If you've gotten it to work on your portable, let us know in the comments.

With automatic system-time updates, there's a chance any time you set will be corrected. In that case, you'd wake up to a long list of expired flicks. Frankly, don't count on this hack working for too long anyway since Hollywood is uberprotective of its content and someone's bound to lock this hole down tight within days. We don't know of a similar trick for Movielink or CinemaNow rentals—maybe you do—but our guess is that it's not doable.

Alright so it appears to no longer work. Here's what happened on our end. Before, we had set our computer date to 2009, and started playing Ratatouille (and Benny started playing The Simpsons) to start the 24-hour timer in 2009. Came back to 2008, everything was gravy. We go to play it again just a few minutes ago, and it tries to connect to iTunes, and then gives us a 5103 error. Benny gets the same deal.

So we delete the busted file and try a fresh download, this time with our computer dated to Jan. 24, a mere week ahead. Download starts, we click play and get the 5103 error—we couldn't even get it start in the future, which was the basis of the original trick. Adrian tried to extend a movie he rented last night by throwing his computer back a week. 5103 error, though coming back to the present he got it to play. We figured it wouldn't last forever.

We're still playing with it, so we'll let you know what other tricks we come up with as we confirm them. For now, feel free to go and play Jobs with time for yourself, and by all means report back. [Apple iTunes]

Rentrak is a go-between company for independent rental companies and movie studios. They allow rental companies to lease films instead of purchasing them, on the basis that a piece of every rental is shared with the studio (and of course, Rentrak). Many major movie studios already participate in the program—including Sony—but the difference at hand is that the titles now extend to Sony's Blu-ray offerings as well as their standard DVD offerings. That's it.

While Blu-ray's competitive practices have been questioned in Europe, and the specific details of Rentrak's Blu-ray profit sharing are undisclosed, to claim something newly evil has occurred is overstepping the bounds of our current knowledge. For now, Sony is playing a card that's been played in the past in order to subsidize otherwise expensive Blu-ray title adoption for rental houses.
[Rentrak via engadgetHD]