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Sony to Make an "iTunes for Movies"

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the downloads-jack-can-agree-with dept.

dAzED1 writes "After years of complaining that the RIAA and MPAA were missing the boat, and should have embraced things like Napster instead of supressing them, we got iTunes and the like. Now, Sony has announced it will 'make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year' according to a report on the BBC, with Sony's iPod replacement being the PSP."

3 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great Idea if they "Get It" by bechthros · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Apple's AACs don't *need* an iPod to work"

    That's because AAC is a product of Dolby, Apple just licensed it.

    --
    They will never stop until somebody makes the
  2. Re:This could rock, except... by Calroth · · Score: 4, Informative

    Who wants to watch a movie on a 3" screen?

    Actually, I bet that a lot of people do (or will).

    It's like audio. Back in the day, we had huge hi-fi systems, speakers, amps, the whole lot for the ultimate enjoyment of music. But then the industry brought out a whole bunch of miniature radios and players, culminating in the Sony Walkman (and OK, the iPod) and people found a whole new way to enjoy music: on the move, outside, inside, wherever they felt like it.

    Now substitute "huge hi-fi systems" with "home theatre systems" and "Sony Walkman" with "Sony PSP"...

    One of my friends has a Dell Axim (that's a Pocket PC) with a 640x480 screen, and DivX playing software. It's awesome, you can watch ripped TV shows literally where you like, on the bus, in the park outside, etc. etc., and the quality is brilliant. I could get used to that. (Not that I advocate ripping TV shows.)

  3. Re:The thing is.... by jalefkowit · · Score: 4, Informative

    You hit the nail on the head there. Sony's decision to offer the top 500 shows that they really don't understand what makes ITMS so successful at all.

    If there are any Sony folks reading, you should click through and read the following articles immediately:

    Here's the key grafs from the 2nd piece (by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and now chief of JotSpot):

    Let's look at the Amazon example. This graph shows that Amazon sells roughly 2.3M books and that the average Barnes and Noble retail store stocks 139,000 books. So, Amazon stocks roughly 2.2M more books that Barnes and Noble.

    No surprise here. That's the benefit of an online storefront. Massive inventories housed in ultra-low-rent areas that are fronted electronically.

    The astonishing figure is the percent of sales that comes from the "long tail" of books (books that Amazon carries but that Barnes and Noble doesn't).

    57%.

    57% of Amazon's sales come from books you can't even buy at a Barnes and Noble...

    Yep, just like I would imagine a good chunk of ITMS sales come from singles you can't find at your local Sam Goody -- and Kraus cites in the same article that "every iTunes song has been purchased at least once", which would seem to bear that out when you figure that ITMS has an inventory of over a million songs. That's a heck of a long tail business.

    If Sony had a brain they'd be figuring out how to use the PSP as a platform to revitalize their back catalog -- all those movies they've got sitting around that aren't Top 500 material, but which have a few fans here and there. If they can get the distribution system efficient enough the profits would probably be considerable.

    --

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