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iTunes Music Store Sells Videos
bonch writes "With the recent release of iTunes 4.8 and its ability to manage and play videos, several users are discovering that iTunes is now selling videos through the online store. One example is the 'Feel Good Inc.' single used in the recent rollerskating iPod ad. The videos are provided in DRM-less .mp4 format encoded in 3ivx D4 4.5 and are available with purchase of the album."
Hopefully the next release will incorporate a preview - a few seconds to help those of us who would otherwise have no idea what these videos may be.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
can soon be rated with the number of available movies of Steven Seagal.
However this could be balanced out with some porn so.... Apple, be wise.
I'm sure this is just a toe in the water for Apple to start offering movies and other on-demand video with ITMS. Anyone who's been watching how movie trailers are hosted by Apple, how iTunes interfaces with HQ trailers, how Jobs has been talking of late, and how ITMS has been dabbling in video can't help but see the writing on the wall. Apple wants to be your one-stop media shop, not just the place where you buy songs or little music players. They're looking to marginalize entire swaths of the old regime in one fell swoop, and for my part, I'm rather looking forward to the shake-up.
Yes, a lot of the preceding has been hinted at by Cringely, there's nothing wrong with agreeing with someone else's take on things. :)
This video thing is great, but I just wish they would sell higher quality/lossless audio files first. Bandwidth wouldn't be much greater than these video files they will be selling. I won't even mind paying $2 a song if they were in FLAC or Apple Lossless format.
SP
I think that music videos are the perfect feeler for other non-drm media - like movies. If people really buy videos (which they will) then I think we can expect to see other kinds of video follow... like possibly TV shows through iTunes. Which would make the TV industry a fortune as a LOT of people would pay $5 for a high-quality version of a TV episode even when they could go and find the bittorrents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
iTMS Australia. Talk about vapourware!
It's only vaporware if they said it was coming. I try to keep up on Apple news, but I don't remember Apple ever promising that iTunes was coming to Australia, so therefore they owe you nothing. I've heard that an actor and a musician said it was coming, but not Apple. If they made that promise, please post the link. I'd love to get more Chumbawumba songs. (No, really, I would.)
World's tallest building rises in the desert
The videos aren't in 3ivx format, they're in QuickTime MPEG-4. QT reports them as being 3ivx if you have the 3ivx codec installed, which is likely where the confusion arose.
Okay.
Everybody's wrong about the video iPod thing. A video iPod would be a dumb idea for lots of reasons, some technical, some psychological. If you want to know where we're going with video playback, look not to the iPod but to its considerably less famous little brother, AirPort Express.
(Addendum: I see now that at least a couple of commenters have figured this out already. Good for them. You all suck for stealing my surprise. One of them even nailed the big challenge, still to date unsolved, right on the head. I wonder if you guys will know it when you see it?)
Yes, of course we're going to be selling new types of content via the iTunes distribution model. It may or may not happen through the "iTunes" name. On the one hand, selling movies and TV shows through a store called "iTunes" makes no sense. On the other, iTunes has HUGE brand recognition right now. It's a marketing decision.
What exactly we offer depends on whose content you're talking about. Some content will be provided to us in 720-by-486 anamorphic, which we'll encode in H.264 at between 1 and 2 megabits. (Did you notice that QuickTime 7 has additional support for anamorphic video? I knew you would.) Other content will come in at HD, and for the time being we'll scale that down to half-HD at 2 Mbps. Doing full 1080/24p at 8 Mbps just isn't practical right now given that even the fastest cable modems in the US top out at 4 Mbps; in order to get real-time streaming of full-HD content, you'd need one of those new-fangled fiber optic Internet services that the telcos are starting to roll out. That's too forward-thinking for phase one. But we can do 2 Mbps now to the same customers we're shipping iTunes songs to.
Pricing, terms and dates will be totally up in the air until five minutes before we announce, and maybe even after that. Remember the Australian store? We had to put that roll-out on indefinite hiatus when The Label That Shall Not Be Named pulled out. All of this depends on the content-providers. Yes, somebody out there is going to say "Pixar." To that person I whisper the name "Disney" and the phrase "subsidiary rights." It's not as simple as you think.
Basically what stands between us and roll-out today is 10% technological and 90% business. It strikes me as kinda funny that some people look only at the technology part of our operations for clues as to future directions. Yes, we shipped iTunes 4.8 with video playback. Whoopty-do. iTunes is built on QuickTime. Adding video support was so incredibly trivial, you wouldn't believe it. It's a tiny thing. What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property. So when we go to (say) Disney and ask them to let us distribute their unimaginably valuable IP over the Internet, we're going to have a little bit more credibility than whatever copycat tries to come along behind us (cough*Napster*cough, cough*Walmart*cough).
These are the things you guys need to be paying attention to. Not the product releases. The lawsuits. That's where you'll find the clues.
No, pretty much everything you said here is wrong.
The Mac mini is meant to be a computer, nothing more. It was designed to be an inexpensive entry to the Mac product line for people who already own PCs and want to step up to something better. It doesn't have anything like the CPU power required for HD playback. You might be able to squeeze 4 Mbps out of it, maybe, if you hold your mouth just right and you're willing to live with some dropped frames. But anything more is not going to be an option this year, and maybe not next either.
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.
(How can we do photos, then? Easy. Photos are even smaller than songs. And unlike video, people often do want to carry photos around with them. Keep reading.)
Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things: Ride on the train, exercise, shop. People like to multi-task with their music.
Video, whether short-form like TV or long-form like movies, isn't like that. Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over. That's a totally different interaction model than music.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
Building a device perfectly capable of playing video and using it to display photos is insanity.
Watching video on a 2 inch screen is insanity. No. It's just completely fucking stupid.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
That's been an option for a little while now, and doesn't require iTunes 4.8. iTunes 4.7 is handling it fine right now.
He does seem to have Job's style, doesn't he? Lots of Slashdotters have criticized him for being arrogant, and he definitely is. But he also really knows his stuff. I haven't seem him be wrong yet. And he's not afraid to stick the middle finger up at the Slashdot conventional wisdom, as he did here with the "no video iPod" thing. He's obviously not karma whoring. And he's obviously not astroturfing, because he ADMITS working for Apple. He's a legitimate insider. Only question is, who? I really love the Jobs idea. It almost seems like the sort of thing he'd do, doesn't it?
Who is As Seen On TV?
quicktime's support for anamorphic video has, and continues, to suck.
You're confusing QuickTime with QuickTime-based applications. In QuickTime 7 we added new attributes that tell QuickTime applications to take a movie with native size X by Y and play it back at size A by B. But the applications have to set that attribute.
besides, why the fuck would you offer online movie downloads as anamorphic video?
Because that's what the video is. Standard-def TV masters are stored on videotape in anamorphic format. When they're played back on a widescreen set, they're stretched out to about 850 by 480. That's how widescreen SD works.
It makes no sense to stretch content before encoding it; at that point, you're just compressing noise. It only makes sense to encode it in the native format, 720 by 480, and then stretch it during playback. That's how you get the highest picture quality out of widescreen SD content.
24p describes how cameras like the dvx-100 record video--24 frames per second, progressive scan. not necessarily HD (the dvx-100 shoots straight DV).
I don't understand this comment at all. When I said "1080/24p," maybe I should have been more specific. I was referring to video in the 1920-by-1080 format playing back at 24 frames per second. That's what the vast majority of scripted TV drama is, as well as high-def movie transfers. When that TV goes out over the air, it's converted through a process called "pulldown" to 60i, sixty fields per second interlaced. But that's for broadcast. We obviously won't want to do that, because again, we'd just be compressing noise. If 3:2 is required, we'll add it during playback just like DVD players do.
jvc's HD cameras record 30 progressive frames at 720p, the other HD spec.
Actually, 720p is usually shot sixty frames per second, not thirty. That's why it's so great for sports.
But the vast majority of scripted content is still shot at 24 frames per second, either on film or in 1080/24p. Motion at 24 frames per second has a very distinctive look, totally different from what we're used to seeing on video. Because people are used to seeing 24-frames-per-second content, giving them 60i or 60p is a distraction. Plus it's more expensive, because storing 30 interlaced frames or 60 progressive frames per second obviously takes more disk space than 24 frames per second.
We're going to deliver whatever the master format is. If that's 24p, then we'll deliver 24p. If it's native 60i (like shot in 60i, not interlaced from 24p source), then we'll deliver 60i. QuickTime doesn't care. If adjustments need to be made between the movie on disk and the screen, like adding 3:2 pulldown for display on an interlaced-scan television, then we'll add it at the end, not at the beginning.
But why would Steve Jobs spend all his time posting on Slashdot?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
why didn't you set this attribute in quicktime 7 player, presumably your flagship quicktime application?
Idiot. Quicktime attrs are set when the movie is written. The encoding app has to set the attr. Like Final Cut or iMove, the examples you named.
they're stored on videotape, which, the last time i checked, was an analog medium that had a fixed aspect ratio.
Check again. Videotape hasn't been analog for YEARS. Digital Betacam is by far the most popular standard def format and has been for a decade now. And no, it doesn't have a fixed aspect ratio. It holds either 4:3 or 16:9 anamorphic.
It's funny how you accuse As Seen for having his facts wrong when you clearly don't know the first thing yoruself.
besides, i don't really remember seeing a whole lot of standard-def tv in widescreen.
Everything that's shown in HD is shot in widescreen, whether it's center-cropped to 4:3 or shown letterboxed. Some of the prominent shows that are shown letterboxed include "Enterprise," "ER" and "Mythbusters."
so "the majority of scripted dramas" are not 1080/24p.
Do you understand the difference between how it's shot and how it's transmitted? Everything that's not live is shot 1080/24p or film @ 24p, then CONVERTED to 1080i or 720p for broadcast. Since AAPL is going to take the broadcast part out, there's no need to convert.
why would abc and fox shoot at 1080 when they're going to to have to convert and broadcast at 720?
Because studio equipment is all 1080. Besides, most of ABC's stuff is shot on either Super 35 or Super 16 and telecined anyway.
it took a very large update to final cut pro to support the 3:2 pull down from a 24p camera
A 24p camera doesn't insert pulldown, idiot. Pulldown is only present at 30 fps.
you think vhs really handled 24fps?
WTF? VHS was an ancient analog format that stored 30i WITH PULLDOWN. Your an idiot.
but leaves the vtr end at 60i
That's just wrong. The HDW-F500 records EVERYTHING at 24p then adds pulldown on playback.
Dude, you need to get off your high horse. You're just plain wrong.
The fact that you and many other persistent "AppleTurfers" are hanging out on Slashdot pretty much undermines your point.
If the Geek Vanguard is not Apple's market, why are you guys so insistent about articulating Apple's positions to them? Obviously the perceptions of this community is important to Apple's advocates or we wouldn't see you here.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.