Rooted Android Devices Blocked From Marketplace Movie Rentals

Bad news, hackers: It looks like the honeymoon with Android is over. As Android Central points out, rooted devices are being blocked from renting movies from the Android Marketplace. Rooted devices that attempt to download a movie are pinged with the following message: “Failed to fetch license for [movie title] (error 49).”

The error 49 messages only shows up for rooted devices, which are seemingly unsupported due to requirements related to copyright protections. So far this has only been tested on the Motorolla Xoom, the only device that can access the service when loaded with Android 3.1. But rental marketplace support will be rolled out to Android 2.2 and higher devices in a few weeks. Those with a rooted Nook or Samsung Galaxy S II might need to look elsewhere for their movies.

It’s just a shame we’ll have to use a Netflix or Hulu workarounds to watch paid-for content on the “open” smartphone/tablet platform–that is until a marketplace rental workaround is figured out.

[Google Support via Android Central and Engadget]

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