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Apple Movie Store Only Serving Disney Films?
Alex Romanelli, Variety writes "Variety has the scoop on Apple and Amazon's forthcoming movie download services. Apple's will launch with only Disney as a partner. Amazon will have most, and possibly all, of the major studios on board. The reason comes down to price, insiders said.
Amazon.com will launch its movie download service later this week, numerous sources confirmed, while Apple will start selling films on Tuesday as part of iTunes."
I'm sorry that I already posted - if I could use my mod points, I'd mod ya down for offtopic.
Forget the lot of them, they are all useless.
Why should I pay as much or more than a DVD for a download copy that it riddled with DRM and much lower in quality?
For any download I expect them playable on anything I might use. At the moment I have 3 machines I regularly use. A Windows XP Box, a Mac Mini and a Kubuntu box. I also expect to be able to stream whatever it is from my Kubuntu box as I use that as a file server. Also playing on my pda and laptop and hey even on my real dvd player are also pretty important things.
This stinks of the current trend of charginf ridiculour prices for something just because it is downloadable.
Hey companies downloadable saves you loads of money pass this on to me instead of expecting me to quadruple your profit on things.
I'll stick to DVD thanks, at least the problems with that have been overcome.
+----------------- | What is the question!
No. . . but he does have the largest sole ownership of stock in Disney. . .
138 million shares, or 6.3 percent of outstanding stock
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
There are rumors that there will be a device introduced alongside this that will allow basically that use, yes. (Basically a small network access point that can be streamed the movie/song from your authorized computer.)
It won't go to any device, but your DVD player can't download movies anyway. It will take a 'compatable' player, and Apple will probably have standard outs for normal TVs on it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I've done this with CDs for years, as I imagine many others do. The first thing I do after I get an audio CD is rip it to ~224 Kbit OGG files and place the files on my storage server downstairs. I can play the audio through my computer, my portable player, and any TV which has a media player device like XBMC. Once I upgrade my storage server with more space (and get a better backup policy than I have now), I'll move on to ripping video from all DVDs.
I'm thinking of picking up another original Xbox (or two) to make some cheap media boxes. For anyone out there that cares and still doesn't know, you can now soft-mod your Xbox to put stuff like XBMC on it without ever opening the case. With XBMC you can start the Xbox to easily bypass the mod to play Live games to avoid banning, though it might be ok anyway. (I don't play much on Live anymore.) If you don't play on Live, you have no excuse. Go get XBMC. Today. If there's anyone in the St. Paul, MN area that wants help, send me an email.
Hmm. I seem to have become something of an XBMC evangelist, but really, it's that cool.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Well, you're forgetting a couple of things. One, for months, many rumor sites, analysts, and the prevailing best educated guesses have reiterated that there is definitely a "real" video iPod on the way (i.e., with a bigger screen and better video decoding capabilities), and that neither the video iPod nor the iTunes movie store would be launched until both were ready. So there may indeed be a new iPod alongside this announcement anyway. Two, even the current iPod can play up to 480x480 (albeit MPEG-4 Part 2), so this suggests that the decode capability just wasn't powerful enough on the current generation iPods. There's no reason higher resolution content can't be played back on a lower resolution screen: some of the detail will just be lost.
Of course, you are correct about the disparity in general between watching something on a portable device, versus a nice big TV. Hopefully Apple handles this gracefully, because people won't want 320x240 movies (though, even the 320x240 TV shows are not bad on a standard def TV, for most peoples' tastes).
For those that want to buy a good amount DVDs they will have to pay a premium once they surpass their download limit. My ISP charges $1/GB over my 100 GB limit
Even if these stores will go for the rather arbitrary upper limit of 4.5GB per film, you'd still need to buy 22 films in a one month period to reach that 100GB limit. If you have that kind of money to spend, you probably won't even notice your ISP's extra charge.
I'm on the band-wagon with the "Special Features required". I won't pay for a downloaded movie w/o the Special Features. But I don't think that we are without hope here.
DivX 6, released a full year ago, has the features required to effectively make a video file into a DVD (subtitles, menus, etc.). Apple has the benefit of closed formats, so what's to stop them from providing an "enhanced video" file that implements the DVD features. I'd like to believe that they'd have the foresight to handle the Special Features issue.
If they don't then I suspect they may be hindering their sales. Of course, they could just come out with an external backup drive / media server and pitch the whole kit as a "cool new idea". This may get the fish biting. Of course, us slashdotters will just rip our DVDs like we always have :)
The big advantage of digital distribution is that the costs are so much lower for the studios than manufacturing disks and selling them. What this means is that something like the iTunes Media Store is the perfect place for the studios to sell all that content that is not cost effective to release on DVD.
What will be interesting is to see if the policies of "limited run" (like what Disney does with their films) carries over to the digital world or if we finally see an end to those stupid practices.