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."

Comments

Re:My only question is resolution

[daveschroeder]

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).