In a post last month I stated that I thought it was a mistake for Apple not to offer movie rentals via iTunes:

“But I think Apple’s mistake in this regard is refusing to do movie rentals. While it’s true for music that many people want to own the songs and not simply pay to stream or rent them, music rental was never a big business. Movie rentals, however is a huge business; people like renting movies. Do I want to buy a movie like Employee of the Month? No. Will I rent it? Yeah, sure why not.”

Well today guess what the hot new rumor is? Yep, according to AppleInsider one analyst who was present at Apple’s shareholder meeting now fully expects them to offer an iTunes movie rental service sometime in 2008.

It just makes sense to me that Apple should have been offering this from the beginning, or at least since the launch of Apple TV. If they were only going to include a 40-gigabyte hard drive on the Apple TV, movie rentals that you don’t keep on your system past when you watch them seemed like the obvious choice. Sure with Apple’s current sub-DVD quality movies you could hold 30-some on your 40gb drive, but when they start offering high definition, that number is going to go down quite a bit – and really who wants a device that can only hold a few of your collection of films?

Yes, streaming, streaming blah blah blah – 40 gigs seems a bit excessive if they were only planning to use that to buffer the streaming; after all, you can only watch one movie at a time. 40 gigs however is a nice (though not great for HD downloads) size if you’re going to offer rentals that get deleted upon completion or after a certain time period.

It’s good to see that Apple is adapting to the market lest they let companies like their bitter foe Microsoft walk all over them in this arena.