Apple's Replay service coming soon?

[wastedyuthe]

I have just read an article on AppleInsider here (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/11/apple_prepping_itunes_replay_on_demand_video_servi ce.html), which states that the thing I have wanted for so long may finally happen!
Basically, if you keep buying films and tv shows on iTunes (or even rip your own dvd's), you're going to keep running out of space. I bought a 1TB external drive last weekend because I ran out of room on my last one. Now finally I can start buying some of the new HD tv shows in the UK store now. But- there will be a time in the future when even a 1TB drive will get full.
We should be able to buy videos from the iTunes store, yet have the option to not download it and just stream it instead, saving valuable space on our HDD's. Then, if you did ever want to download it you could, as you have paid for that right.
Now, according to this article, it seems Apple may finally get this service up and running. Backing up wouldn't be a problem anymore, as if your hard drive fails, you can just download the vids again, or stream them. And you certainly wouldn't need to keep buying bigger and bigger hard drives (as I have had to).
Opinions please.

[mkrishnan]

I think it's a great thing. If you think about it, the mantra in e-mail was that inbox space was expensive and unwieldy to maintain, so users should be limited to 5MB or 20MB or whatever, until Google came along and clearly demonstrated that this was inaccurate. Apple has always held the policy that they can't allow for rampant re-downloading. Why not? If I've paid hundreds of dollars now for digital copies of songs from iTunes, and Apple knows exactly what I bought, they really should let you re-download anything you want, whenver you want, without charge. Streaming would be a nice bonus -- it would be nice if I didn't need to devote 40GB or whatever of my local hard drive to a copy of my music, since my home computer never plays music when it's not connected to the net anyways....

[1337brian]

I like the idea! Now I have a lot of movies that I ripped from my own DVD's that I obviously can't add all of them onto my phone @ once, To circumvent the issue, I installed a TV tuner card and ORB on my home PC, Since November I have been streaming ALL of my movies, 50GB worth, and all of my music another 80GB worth. As well as Live TV and all of my photos...
Seeing as how I don't buy much off iTunes, I don't think it would help me, as I already have a pretty good solution. But I could see the heavy power buyers on iTunes getting a whole heck of a lot of use...