“On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.”

With one less competitor out of the way, Apple can now focus its all mighty media dominating power on trying to figure out how to distribute a digital file in a reliable way. Maybe Apple can borrow a few of those trucks formerly used to distribute loads of VHS tapes to stores and hand deliver movies the old fashioned way.

You can read all of the gory details about the demise of the VHS tape over at latimes.com.

This seems to be a big enough issue that I thought I would give it it’s own post, but it seems as though Apple has dropped the ball with their release of The Dark Knight as a rental. TDK was originally to be released as a rental on the 26th, but the release day seemed to be delayed by at least a day, and now there seems to be random issues with some Apple TV users not being able to rent the title at all. Something screwy is going on on Apple’s end of things. It looks like someone forgot to flip a switch before they took their Christmas vacation.

So if you are having issue trying to rent The Dark Knight, or you’ve found a way to rent it that wasn’t a direct route please share your story.

Below is the list of new HD Rentals that have been added to Apple TV.

Technically there are only two new HD rentals available today. I say technically because these movies were available as of the end of last week, but we had not officially counted them. It looks like everyone at Apple Inc. took a long holiday weekend because there weren’t any other titles added, and I use the term added loosely where TDK is concerned.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The Dark Knight

Head on over to the HD Rentals page to see this weeks entire list of new titles.