Apple to Offer MGM Movies

UnknowingFool writes "Apple announced today that it will be adding MGM movies to its movie catalog. With Apple already selling Disney and Paramount movies, how long will it be before the other studios work out a deal with Apple?"

Comments

Follow or die

[BrowserCapsGuy]

It seems to me the other studios will eventually have no choice but to accept this new method of distribution. Man that sounds dumb. But it's true. Good for Apple for forcing a change that I think most honest, paying customers have been demanding.

Re:Follow or die

[bradavon]

Have you not heard of Apple TV? Besides Windows is unique but it doesn't stop it from being so popular. The Ipod is popular as it looks nice and is easy to use. To the majority of consumers looks are the most important thing.

say no to blogs

[timmarhy]

am i the only person that's grateful to the poster for NOT linking to a stupid apple fan boy blog?

When in Australia??

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool and all, but how long does is it gonna take before TV and Movie content trickle down to other iTunes stores, like Australia.

Sadly, my guess is never.

no hd?

[timmarhy]

one thing i'd like to point out - these movies aren't even dvd quality. not sure what the point of that is? seriously if people ripping captures from hd tv can manage dvd quality, you'd think apple with all it's resources could do better.

oh and wake up and smell the codecs - h264 can do dvd quality at 200megs per hour, you can't tell me peopel with adsl wouldn't be able to download that.

Re:no hd?

[BiggerIsBetter]

When the majority of people seem perfectly happy with YouTube quality, why invest in more bandwidth/storage/quality?
Because YouTube is free, and Apple wants use to pay. Because DVDs are cheap to rent. And because the pirated copies we can download are generally top quality rips. If I'm paying for movies from Apple, I want something of competitive quality that gives me a reason to spend my dollars (including bandwidth costs, which are significant in some markets).

Besides, Apple wants to sell these movies to play on their users' iPods, whose screens dont't even have NTSC resolution.
Then they're missing an enormous chunk of their market.

Re:no hd?

[sheddd]

I've bought a bit from the apple store; the average bitrate for their sd content is ~1500kb/second. So assuming your modem kicks ass and you average 50kb/second, it'll take 30 hours to download an hour show, or more realistically, 20 hours to download an hour show that's actually 40 minutes minus the commercials. So your download power on a modem is about one show per day.

I doubt there are many dialup Itunes video users, but who knows?

Re:no hd?

[hcdejong]

At 750 Mb, it won't be DVD quality, let alone the quality expected when you say 'HD'. It may be 720p, but it'll be compressed all to hell.

Ok, it's a step.

[Hawthorne01]

Let's hope they go from selling movies online with DRM to selling movies online sans DRM. If the record labels (ok, EMI) went from no real online presence to the iTunes store to DRM-free music in less than five years, there's hope the movie studios can learn the same lesson.

Gotta say: "Who Cares?"

[OverlordQ]

I for one would rather go buy a more expensive DVD then get a crappy quality video from iTunes.

Re:Gotta say: "Who Cares?"

[Mr2001]

You've been modded down, but you're right. In most cases, the DVD doesn't cost more than $5 over Apple's price, and you get slightly higher video quality, bonus features and commentary, and you can play it anywhere. There's no PlayFair or QTFairUse for iTunes's video DRM, so the movies you buy there will only play on a computer, an iPod, or the stillborn Apple TV.

Re:Gotta say: "Who Cares?"

[Jerry Rivers]

Good grief, OverlordQ's post is not a "troll." I wish people would think a little before the get out the mod bat. Just because someone expresses an opinion contrary to your beliefs does not mean they are trolling for anything.

I happened to disagree with him that buying a DVD is better than buying a crappy iTunes video. Unless you get the DVD used and for a very cheap price of course. You then either have to resell it or trash it unless you like having all sorts of old DVDs around that you've already watched. I'll take Netflix over either iTunes or purchasing DVDs any day.

Re:how about the capacity to use OSS to play it ba

[mochan_s]

I'm scared whenever I get a iTunes update notification.

My first reaction always is, what feature did they remove in this update?

What about Europe?

[lucason]

Yada, Yada, Yada... All this is useless to me as long as we can't buy anything over here in Europe.

I think Apple will beat Google

[CrazyJim1]

In the war of online video, I believe rights to media will beat out youtube.com Now YouTube will have it's uses, but for distrobution of movies and television, gaining the rights is the way to go. I think there is more profit in movies and television than there is with YouTube.

Re:Classic Movies

[Dogtanian]

Most of the colorizing was a hack job so it's hard to say if the original prints or negatives of a lot of the films were preserved. Colorizing during the 1980s (which is when I believe it started en masse, and when Turner did it) would still have been a far from trivial task. I expect that they would not have done it on obscure films, and that they certainly would *not* have destroyed the original prints/negatives of well-known films.

AFAIK, also digital colorisation that appeared during the 1980s was video based, and this assumes that they would have discarded high-quality film prints in favour of far lower quality video copies. Even then I assume they would have realised that this was stupid.

Am I the only one to comment that...

[Frenchman113]

We don't need more DRM? Seriously, the only effect this "new method of distribution" would ever have is to make DRM even more ubiquitous than it already is, and I for one don't think that's "awesome" or "blazingly modern". Not only does DRM take away any and all fair use rights that are guaranteed by law, it brings up the interesting question of "what the fsck am I gonna do with all these crappy videos I bought now that Apple's out of business?". Of course, the MPAA would just say "buy it again", but that's another story.

Re:how about the capacity to use OSS to play it ba

[norminator]

QuickTime will play it, but his question was about OSS software, VLC specifically. Non-Apple software can't play Apple-DRM'ed videos. VLC knows how long the video is, and pretends to play it, but there's no video or audio, just a moving progress bar.

On a related note, was anyone else bothered by Steve Jobs' explanation of why there won't be non-DRM'd movies from the iTunes store? He said that with music, 90% of it is already sold without DRM (i.e., CDs), but that with movies, those are usually sold with DRM. I'm presuming that the DRM he was thinking of was CSS. But CSS only requires that the manufacturer of the DVD player acquire a CSS license. It doesn't require the user to do anything, and it doesn't differentiate between different DVD players. When I play an iTMS music file in iTunes, the software knows which of the 5 authorized computers (authorized via my iTunes account) I'm using to listen to that song. When I play a DVD on my computer, or on my DVD player, there's nothing to check to see who bought the DVD, or if the hardware/software playing the DVD has been linked to my account. That would be DRM. DVDs do not use DRM. They use a weak form of encryption.

And music is not different from DVDs in that regard... I'm sure if the first publishers of CDs would have forseen the future of digital music, with mp3s and CD burners, they would have created a CSS-like system for CDs, too.

Re:how about the capacity to use OSS to play it ba

[Captain Splendid]

No kidding. As someone who hopped on literally days after the first version was released for the Mac (Still before OSX no less), it's been really educational to watch a once fine piece software get steadily bloatier over the years. Maybe the critics are right, maybe Apple is the next Microsoft.