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....
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.