According to the ThinkSecret blog, as sued by Apple, "Apple is planning to unveil a robust new content distribution system in January at Macworld Expo alongside its revamped media-savvy Mac mini."
In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology Apple previously received a patent for will serve it to the users computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer's hard drive.
This method, which will be every bit as simple and straightforward for consumers as the iTunes Music Store is now, poses a number of advantages over Apple's current pay-once-download-once system, including saving users' hard drive space and essentially providing a secure back-up of everything purchased. iTunes Music Store customers at present are charged 99 cents every time they download a song, regardless of whether they already bought it, and must back-up purchases themselves. A customer who experiences data loss and loses purchased songs is effectively out of luck as far as Apple is concerned.
Comment: The "Mac mini" project code-named Kaleidoscope was rumoured to be an Intel-based "TiVo-killer" with Front Row 2 software upgraded to offer the sort of PVR functionality of Microsoft Media Center PCs.
