Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Why do studios care whether the movie is sold through DVDs or downloaded? All they care about is total revenue and profit anyway. An additional revenue is always good, and the people who would buy/rent a DVD vs the people that will download the movie probably wouldn't overlap that much.
My Own Millions Blog
So, does this mean we will finally have access to all those classic movies which never made it to DVD?
MGM started in the 1920s. That is a lot of movies that have not seen the light of day in may years. And, will the silent movies (which I don't believe for a second we'll ever get) sell for as much as the modern movies?
The article says they "own" 4,000 (which would be about 50 per year since the 20s). Where is the list of those movies?
How about the UA collection? MGM bought UA in 1981. That means all the Bond movies, and the Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, etc. What of that will we see?
And who knows what rights got suffled around int he whole Turner buyout.
with a decent codec like h264, a 720p movie only comes out at 750megs or so. whats so hard about that?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It looks like Apple is moving away from the operating system business and towards Hollywood's fat pipe into our homes. I hope they find a good buyer. Or better yet they open source it.
What?
Well, they're going to, with the 2009 NTSC OTA cutoff and the 2007 ATSC FCC Mandate, which prohibits the import and manufacture of NTSC receiving sets absent an ATSC Tuner.
Very soon, you will not be able to buy a set OF ANY SIZE from Best Buy or Wal*Mart that cannot receive or display some manner of HD, perhaps not 1080p, but HD.
Also, nice language, High School much?
The movies aren't HD quality because even with average cable/DSL speeds the bandwidth required would be prohibitive. Don't expect to see super high quality downloadable movies until we have fiber to the home.
What about the Xbox360 movies? They're HD quality. Plus, if bandwitdh would _really_ be the issue, they could offer non-HD and HD versions for the movies.
How long before you ship true high-def movies worth watching on today's equipment, rather than this low-res stuff?
-and-
How long before you let me burn that movie to DVD for substantially less money than the $19 it costs me to buy it in the store, so that I can watch it more than once?
Until you can meet at least one, if not both, of the above, you really aren't attracting me as a consumer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think the point the parent is trying to make is why would you spend $$10-$15 to download what's basically an Xvid-Rip quality movie thats DRM'ed to hell, when you can just go to Walmart and get the full DVD for the same price or cheaper and rip it yourself? Oh and on top of that for most people you can likely drive there and back in 1/2 the time it takes to download. Even at 5 Mbps it's going to take you about 20 mins to download 700 megs.
These studios really need to lower the price point on these things. We're seeing the same crap that was tried to be pulled whne they first started selling digital music online - way too much $$$. As soon as they hit the magic price point of $1 or less the things started flying. I think the same thing will happen for movies when they hit around $5.
Why so cheap? Because it's not like music where the brick+mortar media is overpriced - DVDs are actually quite cheap for what you get. If you actually think back I remember spending $25 on VHS releases that were crap nowadays I spend $15 and get a DVD with an assload of extra content and way better quality.
Downloads have to be cheaper than DVDs for people to bother.
The movies aren't HD quality because even with average cable/DSL speeds the bandwidth required would be prohibitive. Don't expect to see super high quality downloadable movies until we have fiber to the home.
Two things:
1) We already have fiber to the home. But it doesn't take fiber download speeds (which aren't much higher than cable, which is fiber most of the way) to download HD.
2) We also already have HD downloads.
Apple is simply behind Microsoft, for once. No other way to put it. No use making apologies for Apple, either.
Personally, I don't think any of these download services are going to matter in the slightest until the rights issues get worked out - and that means more than signing a deal with a major studio. That doesn't automatically bring all that studio's movies onto a download service, because most of these movies never had download rights negotiated in the first place. Remember the early days of VHS? That's what we're in right now with digital downloads. It's going to take decades for all of these rights to be renegotiated on a film by film basis.
Until that happens, most people are just going to keep using services like Netflix with its 70,000 titles (Netflix is an example of the success of the "long tail" - almost all of those 70,000 films are checked out at any given time), including HD-DVD and Blu-Ray if you want high-def. They also offer digital streaming, though their selection is limited, just as iTunes and Xbox Live is.