Warner Bros. to Rent Movies Digitally on Facebook, Starting With 'Dark Knight'

Link to watch: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/darkknight" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/darkknight</a><p>Fascinating move by both Warner Bros. and FB. I wonder if this is streaming from FB datacenters or Warner Bros? No wonder Apple hates FB, they just went up against Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Google/Youtube (EDIT: Also, Hulu) in the video rentals space, and social is one aspect that affects movie watching the most. Very smart.<p>EDIT: Ooh, they also launched an iOS app that allows you to buy the movie: <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-dark-knight-app-edition/id401016418?mt=8&#38;ign-mpt=uo%3D4" rel="nofollow">http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-dark-knight-app-edition/i...</a><p>Also, Imagine being able to use facebook credits earned in Farmville to rent movies...

Sadly my region doesn't support credits for Milyoni's payment system. Still, this is very very interesting.<p>It's times like this when I'm sure the movie studios must at some point think, "Streaming all this bandwidth is expensive, if only there was some way we could put all this on the user, maybe split the film up into chunks and have them stream it from each other in some sort of friend-to-friend way."

Out of curiosity, can anyone describe the experience for the rest of us: How well does it work? Does it require Silverlight or some other plugin? How is the resolution? Etc.<p>I think this is pretty huge. Facebook is obviously exploring several avenues for platform use and WB can pull in a ton of demographic information from this.

Hate this. Still region specific and on Facebook.<p>The Last thing I need in my life(or at least one of the last things) is more apps/companies/etc. trying to make me use Facebook.

It's amazing how the internet allows people and companies to tap into different markets, almost seamlessly, making the "indirect competitors" from Porter's five forces, truly the ones with the most potential to attack a business.

TIL it is correct in American to use the verb "rent" for both parties.

Hold on just a minute, all this time/money should be spent on more lawyers and drm. Replacing an antiquated business model, now that's just crazy!