Last week, Universal announced plans to offer the upcoming film Tower Heist as a $60 rental for Comcast customers in Portland and Atlanta. The rental fee would have covered unlimited viewings for 48 hours. It turns out theater companies such as Cinemark and National Amusements didn’t like that idea and threatened to not show Tower Heist if Universal went along with its plan. Universal has since decided to not offer Tower Heist as a home rental.

MoviePass was set to be a service that was being described as the Netflix for movie theaters. For $50 a month, subscribers would have ben able to see as many theater movies as they wanted. There were some restrictions, but the value for customers was most certainly there. The service was scheduled to debut in San Francisco before spreading out to the rest of the United States by the fall. However, MoviePass was not well received by the theaters and was subsequently shuttered.

We’re getting used to the idea of paying for monthly subscriptions for media we enjoy on a daily basis. Netflix is the obvious choice, but music services such as Slacker Radio and Rdio are also seeing increased membership as time goes on. Services such as these may not have seemed realistic a decade ago, but now it’s hard to image how we ever got along without them. MoviePass is using that same method, but is applying it to movies that are still in theaters.

At the beginning of April, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures agreed to launch a premium video on demand service called Home Premiere. Home Premiere will provide access to movies two months after they’ve arrived in theaters. The cost to rent each movie will be $30 for a period of two to three days. Some theaters aren’t too happy about this service because it could possibly negatively affect theater visits. AMC Entertainment and Regal Entertainment are just to companies that are willing to go to extremes to to combat Home Premiere.

The 3D revolution will be televised. That’s the word from a conference held last week on how 3D is pushing its way into our cultural mainstream. As proof, the conference pointed to six of the top ten movies of 2010 were 3D movies. And it looks like more will be as the number of theaters more »

With the new demand for 3D movies, RealD has decided to offer a line of premium of 3D glasses for retail sale. Instead of using the goofy version offered by a movie theater, you can use a pair of your own that reflects your personal style. The glasses are available as part of a licensing more »

Companies are finally realizing that with the economy the way it is that if they want people to keep renting their movies, they need to make them less expensive. Enter the DVD kiosk.

DVDPlay, the country’s first automated and remotely managed DVD rental kiosk company, recently noticed a need to change their pricing to make it even easier and cost efficient for the customers. Starting October 1st, all of their DVD rentals will be only $1, and this price will extend to some of their Blu-Ray titles as well for a limited time.

Plenty more on the DVD kiosk business after the jump.

To be at the movies and yet also in your pajamas and bunny slippers is the ultimate hi-tech entertainment experience for movie buffs everywhere. Home theater surround sound, however, can be cumbersome to wire and hang. The way around that is to single-enclose sound bars for mounting under flat panel TV screens. Proud as a peacock to be among the first, Definitive Technology displayed its best at CES, the Mythos SSA50, which is slated to go on sale next month.