The battle for control of the DVD rental business continues to heat up.

Redbox, the Coinstar (CSTR) unit which operates more than 15,000 DVD rental kiosks around the country, today announced that it has filed suit against 20th Century Fox over new proposed distribution terms which would prevent Redbox from renting the studio’s DVDs to consumers until at least 30 days after they are released to the public.

As I noted in my May 18 column in Barron’s, Redbox has a similar suit pending against Universal Studios. The issue: Redbox rents movies for $1 a day. The price is so low that the studios fear that consumer will be incented to stop buying DVDs, thus wrecking a lucrative component of studio revenues.

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Twentieth Century Fox actually has two deals with Apple that Steve Jobs announced today with Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Jim Gianopulos. A lot is being made of the video rentals, more on that in a bit. But we’ll start with a look at the DVD-download combo; the Apple version is only available for now with Fox. Fox first tried it with Windows on “Live Free or Die Hard.” Buyers get a digital version on the second disk of special editions; it can be uploaded to a computer and moved to portable devices. In iTunes’ case, the digital copy file goes straight to iTunes and can be used with only one iTunes library; it can be used on a PC or Mac, video iPods, iPhone or Apple TV.

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