As is now being widely reports, iTunes has now officially removed NBC content from iTunes as their contract expired without renewal – but what would seem like an awful time for iTunes (some had NBC content making up 40% of iTunes’ television store sales) is not without a glimmer of hope: News Corp is reportedly close to a deal with Apple about putting 20th Century Fox movies on iTunes in early 2008.

This is huge news for a number of reasons. First all of all, this news dampens the blow from the NBC pull-out that might otherwise make a lot of people (and maybe partners) lose faith in the video section of the service. Second is that iTunes hasn’t had a big catch for their movies portion of the service in months – even though many were speculating early on that all the major studios would jump on board rather quickly given iTunes dominance in music. Third, this deal is said to be for both new and catalog 20th Century Fox content, which is big because the last few deals Apple has secured – with Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate – have only been for back catalog movies, which are nice, but doesn’t exactly grab the hype or the sales that new releases do.

There are also a number of unanswered questions with such a deal. Will 20th Century Fox be included in Apple’s almost surely upcoming iTunes Movie Rental service (maybe that is even a catalyst that brought them to the table willing to make a deal?)? Did Apple really backdown a bit and give 20th Century Fox a better deal than they gave initial partner Disney to get the deal done. And finally, is part of this deal to allow for iTunes-compatible digital copies of films to be bundled with the DVDs (at a premium naturally for the Studios)? If so, that would be huge.

I’m guess we’ll be hearing a lot more about this deal come MacWorld in January. If Apple is able to announce the movie rental service by then too, iTunes video portion will go from dead in the water, to right back in action. If we see an upgraded AppleTV as well (that brings the iTunes Movie Rentals to your television), iTunes could well surge past its competitors in an instant – and it could be just the thing to bring back NBC to iTunes in 2008.