Perhaps seeing an opening with all the strife surrounding Netflix, a new report says that Apple (News - Alert) is in talks with several Hollywood studios to set up a streaming movie service. Of course, iTunes has long been one of the biggest and best ways to buy movies and television series, but the service has always fallen short of Amazon and other companies when it came to offering streaming video. 

With the extended presence of iCloud, it appears Apple is finally ready to get into a business that could with some fresh blood.

Using iCloud would mean that users who purchase a movie on iTunes could watch that movie on a number of different devices. Presumably, should Apple go with a full streaming model that would be the case for that service as well. iCloud’s function right now has more to do with the ability to gain a “cloud copy” of a song that you can play on any device as long as the device recognizes a song as one you already own. 

Of course, when you are talking about movies, people generally don’t have a huge collection the way they do for music. Because of this reason, it is hard to tell whether there would be an increase in the $25 per year charge that is currently levied when using the full sized iCloud.

One thing that could be standing in Apple’s way is that Hollywood has already envisioned their own cloud based movie storage system. Dubbed “UltraViolet” the service is supposed to let people have a “cloud copy” of any physical movie or Blu-ray they have purchased. Eventually UltraViolet will allow you to then play your movie on a ton of different devices. 

The drawback with UltraViolet right now is that it is so new, there aren’t many devices that actually have the software. This is where Apple has a bit of a leg up, as iTunes is so prevalent and so many people now have different iDevices. The question that must be asked when talking about this particular plan is whether the studios actually want to okay a competitor to UltraViolet at all.