Theaters, movies, moviegoing and other core components of what we once called “cinema” persist, and may endure. But they’re not quite what they were in the analog cinema era. They’re something new, or something else — the next generation of technologies and rituals that had changed shockingly little between 1895 and the early aughts. We knew this day would come. Calling oneself a “film director” or “film editor” or “film buff” or a “film critic” has over the last decade started to seem a faintly nostalgic affectation; decades hence it may start to seem fanciful. It’s a vestigial word that increasingly refers to something that does not actually exist — rather like referring to the mass media as “the press.”

Netflix had paid an estimated $30 million for Starz content in 2008, which in hindsight was a steal. Three years ago, Netflix had just started appearing on set-top boxes like the Xbox 360, and Hulu was still getting off the ground. To renew the deal with Starz, Netflix had earmarked $250 million, according to the AP.

UPDATE: Here’s a story by the L.A. Times’ Ben Fritz that says Netflix offered $300 million, but Starz wanted tiered pricing, which would charge subscribers a premium to view its content. Interesting, but not surprising, that Netflix didn’t want to go that route.

Starz said it wants to “protect the premium nature of our brand by preserving the appropriate pricing and packaging of our exclusive and highly valuable content.” Media companies have become nervous about Netflix’s grip on the streaming video business, and are hoping to drive up prices by shopping their content around.

This looks like a lose-lose-lose to me. Netflix users obviously lose a whole bunch of content. With less content, Netflix will have a harder time killing the DVD, which according to some pundits was the company’s true motivation for raising prices. Starz, meanwhile, just left up to $300 million on the table, with no guarantee that it’ll make that money back without Netflix.

Still, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sees the up side: Starz content only accounted for 8 percent of Instant Watch viewing, and could account for 5 percent to 6 percent by year-end, as Netflix licenses more content. “We are confident we can take the money we had earmarked for Starz renewal next year, and spend it with other content providers to maintain or even improve the Netflix experience.”

That promise, of course, assumes other content providers won’t think like Starz and try to take their content elsewhere.

Zediva launched out of beta last March, with streaming rentals of new releases for $2 per night, or $10 for a 10-pack. It offered new movies before they became available through Netflix and Redbox, and didn’t pay a dime to movie studios. The trick was to let each individual user rent an entire DVD player, along with the disc inside, remotely over the Internet. Zediva argued that it was just like a brick-and-mortar rental store, but with a different delivery method.

Not surprisingly, movie studios disagreed. The Motion Picture Association of America sued Zediva and argued that the service’s rentals were actually performances, entitling studios to licensing fees. U.S. District Judge John Walter concurred, and has given Zediva and the MPAA a week to work out the wording of an injunction.

Even without legal troubles, Zediva had a slim chance of becoming a thriving movie service. Shortly after Zediva exited beta, it had to cut off new registrations because it couldn’t provide enough DVDs and DVD players to keep up with demand, and has remained an invite-only service ever since.

Oddly enough, these service issues played into the judge’s decision, as he noted that movies were often unavailable for rental. “The message that a particular copyrighted work is unavailable or ‘out of stock’ is totally inconsistent with the concept of ‘video on demand,’ which means it is always available, and creates a significant risk of damaging customer goodwill as customers become disillusioned, frustrated, and confused about the video on demand market in general,” Walter wrote.

Zediva insists that the fight isn’t over, and plans to appeal. It’s a long shot, but at least Zediva doesn’t have to worry about keeping its DVDs in stock and up to date in the meantime.

In addition to unveiling two significant updates to its Android operating system on Tuesday – Android 3.1 and the next-generation Android Ice Cream Sandwich – Google took the wraps off its long-discussed Google Music service and launched a new movie service for Android, too. It was all part of Google’s annual I/O conference for developers, taking place this week in San Francisco.

So what are Google’s new music and movie services all about, and how will they work for you? Here are answers to all your burning questions.

What does Google Music actually do?

Google Music lets you store your music collection on Google’s servers. Like with Amazon’s recently launched Cloud Drive, you upload your songs once — using a guided tool — and then can listen to your music anytime, on any computer or Android device.

As you’d expect, everything is automatically and continuously synced, including playlists, so you have an identical experience regardless of what device you use. All you have to do is sign in with your Google account, and you’re good to go.

“No wires, no painful syncing — it’s all just available instantly,” Google Product Manager Paul Joyce explained during Tuesday’s event.

Can I use Google Music now?

Google is treating Google Music as a beta service to start, so you have to request an invite to get on-board. The beta is open to U.S. users only so far, though Google says it hopes to have the service available everywhere eventually.

Do I need any special apps to use Google Music?

On a computer, you don’t need anything other than your browser; you just go to music.google.com to get the whole shebang. From an Android phone or tablet, you can use the official Google Music app for a three-dimensional interface that’ll handle both your cloud-stored songs and any music saved locally on your device.

The Google Music Android app is available now for all devices running Android 2.2 or higher.

How much storage does Google Music give me?

Right now, Google Music is allowing users to upload up to 20,000 songs free of charge. Amazon’s Cloud Drive, in comparison, gives you room for about 1,000 songs and then charges for any additional space.

Will Google Music always be free?

Not necessarily. At Tuesday’s event, Joyce said Google Music would remain free “at least while it’s in beta.” At this point, it isn’t clear what the long-term pricing structure will be.

What if I want to listen to music offline, like when I’m on an airplane?

No problem: The Google Music Android app automatically stores your most recently played songs on your device so you can access them without an Internet connection. You can manually select specific albums or playlists to be made available for offline use, too.

Can I buy music through Google Music?

Not yet. Google had planned to create a music store within the product but ran into conflicts with the record labels (their demands were “unreasonable and unsustainable,” according to one Google manager).

That said, Google has indicated that it plans to keep talking with publishers in order to find some sort of integrated music-selling solution for Android.

Can I upload music from iTunes?

Yep: The Google Music upload tool has an option for that. As long as the files aren’t DRM-protected, it should be smooth sailing.

Can I use Google Music on my iPhone, too?

Don’t count on it. There’s no dedicated Google Music app for iOS, of course (come on, are you reallythat surprised?), and Google confirmed to me that the Web-based player requires Flash to run.

Sorry, Safari.

What’s this “Instant Mix” thing I’m hearing about?

Google Music has a feature called Instant Mix that’ll create playlists for you. It’s kind of like Pandora, only limited to your own music collection: You select a specific song, then Google Music goes through your library and picks out other songs it thinks would go well with your choice.

Okay, so how ’bout movies — how does that work?

Google’s movie-streaming service lets you rent a movie from the Android Market, then watch it on the Web or on your Android device. Once you rent a film, you have 30 days to start watching. After you click “play,” the movie’s good for 24 hours; during that time, you can view it as much as you want from any PC or compatible Android device. You can even watch it via YouTube, if you’re so inclined.

As of now, the Google movie service is available only in the U.S.

How does a movie actually get onto my tablet or phone?

It’s all wireless: You simply make your selection in the Android Market, and the movie streams over-the-air to your device.

Can I watch movies while offline?

Yessiree: Google’s movie-streaming service lets you “pin” a movie to your Android phone or tablet so you can see it even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

What’s selection and pricing like?

Google says it has “thousands” of movies available. At a glance, there appears to be no shortage of new release titles in the virtual racks; you can browse through the Web version of the store yourselfhere.

Pricing ranges from $1.99 to $3.99, depending on the film.

Will Google’s movie-streaming work on any Android tablet or phone?

It’ll work on any Android tablet once the tablet has received the upcoming 3.1 update. Phones running Android 2.2 or higher will get an update that enables movie support sometime “in the coming weeks,” according to Google.

Web-based viewing is available for all users as of today.

Do you want to hang out sometime?

Um, I’m not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand, but sure — give me a ring.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Okay, that’s definitely off-topic now.

Oday ouyay eakspay Igpay Atinlay?

All right — I think we’re done here.

JR Raphael is a PCWorld contributing editor and the author of the Android Power blog. You can find him on Facebook, on Twitter, or at his geek-humor getaway: eSarcasm.com.

(This post republished from PCWorld)

That’s why services like mSpot Movies are trying to get a piece of the action. Although mSpot Movies isn’t new, the service is now slashing prices in hopes of landing on consumers’ radars.

mSpot rents standalone streaming movies for the same $3.99 as other on-demand services, but the main draw is a “club” package that charges a flat rate per month in exchange for credits, which can be redeemed for on demand movies. Starting at $5 per month for 20 credits, good for up to four movies, the basic service is now half as expensive as it used to be. There’s also an $8 option for 40 credits, and a $16 option for 80 credits. Throw in the promise of new and recent releases, and mSpot seems like a decent deal.

But there are caveats.

For starters, the promise of up to four movies with 20 credits rarely works out that way. A small amount of library content does cost 5 credits, but most old movies cost twice that, and all new releases cost either 10 credits or 15 credits. On the basic plan, you’re more likely to end up with two movies per month. For the mid-range plan, which costs the same as Netflix streaming, you’ll get about four movies per month.

The bigger issue is the size and scope of mSpot’s library. Of the 1,200 movies available through mSpot, only half are part of the club package, and plenty of them are throwaways. To get the really good new releases — films like The Social Network and The Fighter — you’ll have to buy a la carte. Club members get discounted rates of $3 or $3.25 for most new movies, but if the club itself doesn’t have a lot of stuff you want to watch, you’re better off with Amazon or iTunes.

On the bright side, mSpot is quite accommodating to mobile devices, with native apps available for iPhone, iPad and Android (including tablets). Other handsets can access the service through the web. That’s also a backup plan in case Apple ever requires mSpot to offer in-app subscriptions. mSpot would probably remove the app from the App Store to avoid paying Apple 30 percent of its new subscriber revenues, chief executive Daren Tsui told me.

As for set-top boxes, only Google TV is supported for now, but Tsui said mSpot is trying to get on a couple of game consoles. He wouldn’t say which ones.

The best thing I can say about mSpot Movies is that it’s not a Netflix clone. It offers a different selection of streaming movies with a different pricing structure. For a subset of movie watchers, that could make a lot of sense, but they’ll have to figure out their viewing habits and crunch some numbers to figure it out.

Shortly after Zediva launched, it discovered it hadn’t built enough infrastructure to handle the demand, and stopped accepting new members. Now it has a worse problem: The Motion Picture Association of America is suing the company on behalf of the major studios, saying that it’s illegally distributing movies. Oddly, the MPAA doesn’t appear to agree with Zediva’s “Hey, we’re just renting a DVD, like Blockbuster–we just happen to be doing it over the Internet!” theory.

I suspect that Zediva’s improbable technological approach would have done the company in sooner or later no matter what. But with the studios ganging up against it, now I’m wondering whether it’ll ever get fully up and running in the first place.

Bingo! Or at least that’s the way it looks at the moment. The site went down, due to technical glitches that the company’s Twitter feed appears to blame at least in part on a mention on the Yahoo home page. (Being reviewed–pretty favorably–by David Pogue in his New York Times column probably didn’t help, either.) Then it came back up, but with a note explaining that the best prospective new members could do was to join a waitlist.

Now, some of my favorite Web sites and services have been crushed by unexpected demand upon launch. It’s practically a rite of passage. (Many come back up swiftly, and work just fine from then on–which always leaves me wondering, why couldn’t their proprietors provide sufficient infrastructure in the first place?) So it’s possible that Zediva will bounce back.

But you gotta wonder. The Twitter feed says that the service received a hundred times the views that the Zediva folks anticipated. If their expectations were so wildly off, how are they going to deal with the demand if the service is a hit? (If they get to be just five percent as popular as Netflix, they’ll have a million customers to deal with.) Isn’t the whole concept ludicrously unscalable? It’s a goofy scheme that strikes me as being only a half-notch or so more serious the one in Be Kind Rewind, the movie in which Jack Black and Mos Def accidentally destroy a store’s worth of VHS tapes and try to recreate all the films as home movies.

When I first heard of Zediva, I wondered how long it would take for the MPAA to sue it into extinction. Now I’m wondering if it might implode before the lawyers have a chance to go to work.

The service, which moves out of beta today, streams new movie releases for $2 a piece — half the price of new releases from iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and Blockbuster On Demand. You can also purchase a 10-pack of rentals for $10 total.

Zediva shaves down its pricing by cutting movie studios out of the equation. Instead of negotiating streaming rights, the company buys up DVDs at retail and uses place-shifting technology to stream the video out of a Silicon Valley data center. Think Slingbox on a massive scale, but with DVD players instead of cable boxes. (I got a mental image of some guy running around, swapping out all the discs, but Zediva assures me that it uses a carousel mechanism to change movies.)

There are advantages to this approach beyond pricing. Because Zediva uses retail DVD copies, all special features are intact even as studios pull bonus content from rental DVDs in hopes of drumming up sales. And unlike other streaming services, Zediva is free to set its own rental time frame, so users get a two-week rental period with a maximum four hours of playback time.

On the downside, Zediva’s rental capacity is limited to the number of DVDs and DVD players it owns. If the movie you’re trying to watch is at capacity, you’ll have to wait. This could be Zediva’s dealbreaker; even before Wednesday’s launch, I noticed a fair number of movies that were rented out, and as it stands, there aren’t a lot of movies to choose from because Zediva is limiting itself to new and popular releases. At launch, roughly 110 titles will be available for streaming.

Also, although Zediva insists that it’s legally entitled to stream DVDs, the whole concept runs the risk of enraging movie studios. We’ve seen this play out before with Redbox. When studios stopped selling DVDs directly to the kiosk operator, it worked around the issue buy purchasing DVDs at retail, just like Zediva.

That presents a scaling problem because some retailers, such as Walmart, now limit new-release DVD sales to five per customer. In the end, Redbox filed anti-trust lawsuits against several studios, resulting in agreements to delay new releases by 28 days in exchange for lower-cost access to DVDs. When I asked Zediva Chief Executive Venky Srinivasan whether he’s heard complaints or spoken with movie studios, he would only say that he’s had confidential discussions on matters he couldn’t disclose.

As for the quality of the service, it’s standard definition like any DVD player, but Zediva is good enough if you’re not a videophile. Movies play in letterbox format, which is either a pro or con based on your personal preference. There’s no support for set-top boxes with the exception of Google TV, which can run Flash content from the web, but any Flash-equipped Android phone should work. Fast-forwarding and rewinding is minor nuisance, because you’ve got to wait for DVD seeking, then buffering. The service accepts major credit cards and Paypal.

I can see the lack of set-top box support being a dealbreaker for a lot of people, but if you watch movies on a laptop or home theater PC, Zediva’s worth considering simply because of its prices. Still, I’m worried about the availability of popular titles and hope Zediva is willing to invest in expanding capacity. Otherwise, it’s just another workaround that doesn’t quite work.

The studio is now selling movies as standalone iOS apps, starting with Inception and The Dark Knight. Both apps are free to download, with the actual movies available as in-app purchases. Buying the film unlocks streaming and downloadable versions, along with bonus features such as games, trivia and soundboards. While watching, you can also send and view status updates on Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re keen on the idea of buying a movie once and owning it for all of your devices, Warner Bros.’ apps are not for you. The in-app movie is completely separate from iTunes (and for Inception, $2 more expensive, at $12 for the full movie), so you’re forever bound to an iPhone or iPad. At least with iTunes, you can watch the movie on a computer or Apple TV.

For me, the restrictive DRM is a dealbreaker. These apps should be perks for purchasing the Blu-ray or iTunes version of a film, not a separate entity unavailable to people who want to watch their movies in other formats. I realize neither of those options are possible in iOS — Apple doesn’t allow for individual discounts or free unlock codes within its apps — but either way, from a consumer perspective it’s a raw deal.

(One exception: In some international markets, the iTunes movie store isn’t available at all, so these apps provide a workaround.)

That’s not to say I don’t like the apps themselves. The surrounding array of extra features are easy to navigate, and I like how you can save sound clips as ringtones and photos as iOS backgrounds. This is definitely a cool way to watch a movie, but for your hard-earned $10 to $12, it shouldn’t be the only way.

And besides, is anyone really going to start building a movie library that consists, in large part, of individual apps?