Google Blocks Android Movie Rentals on Rooted Devices

Excited for your first big movie rental on an Android device? If you've rooted your phone or tablet, guess again: Rooted Android users can't watch Android Market movie rentals.

That's the latest news from Android Central, which found that users attempting to use the Android Market's new movie rental service—officially unveiled at this year's Google I/O conference—receive a specific error message on rooted Android devices: "Failed to fetch license for [movie title] (error 49)."

And Google's not being shy about the exact reason why this error message occurs.

"You'll receive this 'Error 49' message if you attempt to play a movie on a rooted device. Rooted devices are currently unsupported due to requirements related to copyright protection," reads an associated help article.

It's a rather odd line in the sand by Google, given that competing devices and rental services—cough Apple's iPhone and Netflix cough—don't punish jailbroken devices trying to access video rentals. Heck, even Android's Netflix application works fine on a rooted device. In fact, it's the only way to use the Netflix app on device that isn't one of the five phones the app initially supports.

That said, Apple did initially prohibit jailbroken devices from using its iBooks app in a February update to the software.

"It seems that before opening a DRMed book, iBooks drops an improperly signed binary, tries to execute it, and if it works concludes that the device is jailbroken and refuses to open the book," wrote Apple exploiter Comex at the time.

So what's a rooted user to do about Android Market movie rentals? If you're insistent on maintaining your superuser privileges on your device, you need merely wait: There's undoubtedly some kind of fix or third-party patch in the works that will eventually allow root users to tap into Android Market rentals—it's the nature of unlocking a device. As soon as some kind of restriction to content is put in place, it just sends the third-party development community into a tizzy to find a way around it.

There's no indication—official or otherwise—as to how a third-party app could otherwise interfere with a movie rental. Perhaps it's the movie studios, and not Google itself, that are hedging their bets against future apps that could somehow record, transfer, or rip an Android Market movie rental into a re-watchable file. But given the bitrate and quality of these files… would they really be that enticing of a target for would-be pirates?

For more from David, follow him on Twitter @TheDavidMurphy.