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Apple and Fox Set to Announce Movie Rental Deal
mudimba writes "Apple and Twentieth Century Fox are about to announce a deal that will allow users to rent Fox movies over iTunes. The deal will allow people to download movies that will only play for a limited amount of time. 'Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and cutting out the middleman. "It's just a sign the studios feel ... that another distribution channel is where they are choosing to go, and incrementally it hurts Blockbuster and Netflix," Widlitz said.'"
No one's EVER going to crack the encryption algorithms so that a temporary movie becomes permanent! It's BRILLIANT!
The agreement will allow rentals of Fox's latest DVD releases by downloading a copy from the online iTunes store for a limited time, the Financial Times said.
One can't rent digital data because an integral part of renting something is returning it at the end of the rental period. Some people get this, and some people don't: http://www.bash.org/?104052 (warning: language).
Yes, I know they mean DRM. This is slashdot, so nobody has to be reminded that DRM is impossible.
Time for Blockbuster and Netflix et al to form their own cartel!
I live 5 min from my video rental store. So unless the cost is a lot less, I doubt I would want to wait the longer time for a download.
My local Blockbuster has a horrible selection, it's pretty atrocious how bad of a store it is in such a high-end area. I've complained to management but they don't care. They don't have much variety, and what they do have is always out of stock. Even supposed "Gauranteed in Stock" items are rarely there.
I still pop in every month or so to see if they've change, but they've yet to fix anything. So I use a combination of Netflix and OnDemand services for my movie needs. Netflix for stuff I can wait 2 days for, and OnDemand for spur-of-the-moment desires. The only thing I use my Blockbuster card for is the occasional game rental, which isn't often since they only have 1 or 2 copies of a game.
I'd be willing to spend a dollar or two for a movie, if I could watch it for more than 24hrs. Perhaps a week. In very high quality. Perhaps A dollar or two extra for a movie released in the last year.
Going to an actual video store or even using netflix is just too much of a hassle. The membership. The dues. The fees. The lines. The people. The interactions. The driving. Screw that.
What needs to happen is the half-assed cable "on-demand" services need to have more than a few dozen stupid movies -- all either free or for $7 a movie with only 24hrs to watch them. That's ridiculous. Give me a week to watch something I buy. Drop the price to something more reasonable. And then expand the selection from 200 films to 100,000. I will never need netflix or a video store or to buy an actual DVD ever again. I will always resort to the very affordable (preferably) massive library on my television with the flick of a remote control.
Why is it taking so long to accomplish that? It's 2008...
...on iTunes, there will be at least 2 applications that will intercept or otherwise access the data and convert it to a more permanent format.
Almost certainly it'll be Windows only at first, but very soon thereafter, the Mac OS version will appear.
And then the race will be on! First QuickTime will be patched, then the intercept applications will be patched to defeat the QT patch. The subsequent QT patches will break all sorts of things, like iPhoto and Garage Band and anything else that uses the QT engine.
Hilarity ensues for a year or so until Fox says "Screw it! We're not making enough money off this."
Rest of world pays no real attention, as they're too busy watching all the movies and TV programs they've downloaded via The Pirate Bay and from USENET.
In other words, what we're all doing RIGHT NOW.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
"Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and cutting out the middleman"
This doesnt cut out the middle-man, it just makes the middle-man apple.
Isn't Apple the new middleman?
Film at eleven.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've only got two concerns with this, and they have nothing to do with 'renting it'. I rent movies from my local blockbuster and so if i downloaded some file and it 'blew up' after X days, I don't care. I have to return the DVDs anyhow.
My concerns are around the following:
-Downloading times. If we were to assume that the quality of the file being downloaded was equivalent to an uncompressed DVD (~4GB), I'm not willing to wait the 8hrs to download it. I'm a comcast subscriber, and the 'on demand' feature should be how things are delivered. Sit down at the tv, scroll to the movie. Click 'pay' and you get it for 24hrs, watch as many times as you want.
-Getting the movie to the tv. I have both a PC and a macbook pro (laptop). However, neither are very good at getting video or audio to the stereo/tv. The Macbook pro had DVI out, but for audio, i have to use a USB to composite (red/white) cable. So even if the media is Dolby5.1, the laptop sends it to my stereo in.. 2channel stereo. While stereos/TVs move towards HDMI, computers are just moving to DVI.
I'll buy into downloading movies if i'm not forced to a) upgrade my broadband connection from cable/dsl to an OC-3, and b) have to replace my laptops with a desktop/mediacenter pc with an optical out/HDMI.
Reminds me of Vista, This is a great OS, if you upgrade to 4GB of RAM and quad core cpus!
Now instead of just downloading and taking forever to watch the movie I have to upload it back to them after I watch it?
it's going to take somebody to crack the time limit and make it possible to keep the movies forev...oh, never mind. Some little smartass just did it.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Interesting to note that this seems to be one of the channels that the Writer's Guild of America terms "New Media", and correct me if I'm wrong, but the main reason they're striking is about getting residuals from that. I had read somewhere that the movie studios were/are unable to put a market share on it because it's too new to determine an interest level. Guess we'll see what kind of interest level there is.
How is iTunes cutting out the middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be the new middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be peer competition to Blockbuster and Netflix -- especially given their online forays?
I won't argue against the anti-DRMists. I'm generally not a fan of DRM, but have also generally gone with the lesser of the evil. I don't buy CDs, because I don't have the room to store them, I don't like destroying the environment, and I don't use CD players anymore. IMHO Apple's DRM tends to be less evil. In part because Apple doesn't really like DRM -- they haven't yet gone out of their way to really screw you over, and generally ignore the hacks around their system. Sometimes they'll fight back, but so far have given in to the end (showing signs of intelligence).
The thing is, I like renting movies. There are plenty of crappy movies I only need to see once. Providing some system that allows me to do that is a great benefit. It means I don't have to walk to the rental place. I can get the movies whenever I want, and I don't have to worry about DVDs that are overly scratched.
DRM is really the only conceivable way to do this. My main worries is that they'll restrict the rental in stupid ways. Like how long per DVD? Is the time based on when you watch it? If not, downloading a DVD is a time-consuming task, and some pre-planning will have to be involved.
I would think a much better system is to do something like Netflix. Forget about amount of time you have the movie, and instead just do number of movies you can have checked out. Also, if they make the rent time too short (and charge the same amount of money) it may in the end not be worth it. Another approach might be to do something like $2/day.
The vast majority of people simply can't grok emule, don't know what to do when Windows Media Player doesn't recognize a file, etc., etc.
If you can make it simple for them you'll make money.
No sig today...
How many decades have to be spent on reinventing ways to amuse ourselves? Holy crap! Being a stockholder of Apple I'm pleased the stock is growing. As an engineer I would rather see advances at Apple getting into the traditional Engineering Fields with products that can expand their reach and make OS X a leader in the Auto, Aerospace, Bio-Medical and more fields.
Oh never mind! Trek 69 was just delivered to my AppleTV.
They have so much DRM on their buyable vids, you're practically renting them right now. I think the change is that now they're actually going to call it renting and put a time limit on their DRM. Plus ISPs are gonna throttle and packet shape it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
After the consumer lashback against DRM in the audio arena forced recording studios to go MP3, Hollywood is pursuing the Bush-style I-can't-be-bothered-with-history fiasco and repeating the same mistakes. Maybe after so many billions of lost revenue, they'll finally figure it out too. DRM is a dead end.
Something that perpetually fascinates me, which presumably relates to the autism of geeks, is that automatic assumption that all media has to be owned and collected: terabytes of ripped DVD material, etc. I assume these are the people who can never actually see a concert, because they spend the whole time photographing and recording it. I own a handful of films of DVD, although I go to the cinema (the ultimate rental, in a sense) once a week. I rent occasional films, that I missed at the cinema, or want to see for some other reason, and after watching them once, from end to end, I'm quite happy not to have them around any more. What do these people with hundreds and thousands of films _do_ with them? I'm increasingly puzzled at what I myself should be with the thousands of CDs I've acquired over the past twenty years: how many of them do I listen to? How many of them, indeed, have I listened to more than once?
Regardless, no matter *how* close your video store--even if you live *in* it, I can start watching a film from iTunes faster than you could from your live-in video store. Hell, I'd bet I can start iTunes, find a movie and start watching it before you can turn on your TV and DVD player, find and load the disc you've already rented, and start the movie (without even taking into account the FBI warning and superfluous DVD startup animations that will delay your movie no matter how fast your DVD player starts).
Ok so how would this work exactly?
If I watch the first 30 minutes of a movie, does that count as one full viewing? Does it mark the first 30 minutes as being watched once, so I can watch the rest of the movie X times but I can only watch the first 30 minutes again X-1 times? They CERTAINLY couldn't make it count as nothing, cause then people would never watch the credits of the movie, or whatever, and it wouldn't count.
And, I presume these will sync to video-capable iPods. If you only get to watch it three times, whats stopping me from downloading it, syncing it to my iPod, and then watching it three times on my computer AND iPod EACH.
Ok... so all of the above relies on a method that allows you to watch it a certain amount of times, instead of a method that lets you watch it unlimited times within a certain time period.
I know far less about DRM and encryption than guys like DVDJon, but whats stopping me from changing my Mac's system clock?
A good bait for hackers to circumvent it.
As stated previous postings, DRM is an illusion, renting digital files doubly so.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
What happens if I fail to scp them their movie file back within a timely manner? 99 cents a day?
It's always been about instant gratification, eh?
I knew the world was coming to this when I was a teenager and they started programming the toddlers with those chop-chop short spots on Sesame Street. Short attention span, instant gratification. Ultra-lite content, too.
I bet you can bring up a Starsky and Hutch rerun on the screen of your PeeCe magnitudes of scale faster than I can make it down to the community theater to watch a new play performed, too.
What's all that got to do with anything? Are you somehow comparing your local Blockbuster or Hollywood Video with community theatre?
And don't pretend instant gratification is anything new. The microwave oven, television, telephone, railroad, pony express, sail ships, chariots, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, well, my point is, wanting things faster is nothing new, nor is it anything bad.
I mean, why would you *want* to go to your local video store when you can just click download and watch immediately? Perhaps you are blessed with a quality local video store staffed with interesting people who are true movie buffs. If that's the case, more power to you. For the rest of us, or for those who aren't interested in chatting about films, or even for those who are interested in that, for those times you just want to watch the film, perhaps on a whim, how is video on demand from iTunes a bad thing?
I think it's more or less obvious that DRM can't possibly work in the sense that it can't protect content perfectly. Since a standalone computer needs all the components to decrypt the DRM in order to play it, there will always be a way to decrypt the bought or rented media in a way which stores the resulting, unencrypted data.
On the other hand, the current iTunes DRM works pretty well, and most people don't seem to bother with breaking it. Why? Because fair use usually doesn't get in their way. I bought a bunch of iTunes songs, and I have never been bothered by the DRM. The energy needed to remove the DRM is much bigger than the energy needed to cope with the fair use DRM restrictions. Or, from a somewhat different perspective: the features you gain from removing the DRM do usually not justify the time put into figuring out how to break the DRM, finding the apps you need, and then downloading and running them.
Rented movies may be different. You gain a lot from being able to break DRM; namely, you gain the ability to store and watch the movie forever. I guess that breaking the DRM on rented media is a much bigger issue and will be a lot more popular than breaking the DRM on "bought" media.
This is about portable movies more than watching it on your TV. Apple makes their money of iPod sales! Their TV shows, as far as I can tell, usually runs 200MB for a 43 minute TV episode. That'll be about 600 megs for your typical 2-hour film. Comcraptastic customers get 500k+ downloads usually, so they'll finish downloading in about 20 minutes. That's way faster than getting a rental from a store, and Apple will likely allow you to watch as you download. You can "rent" a film before you go to bed, wake up with it already synched, and watch it on the work-commute. At $2-4, I bet many people will go for it. $5 is pushing it. Unless you're on a fast private torrent site, iTunes will be much faster and more convenient than piracy.
And like others have pointed out, the DRM will be cracked quicker than spit and people will be able to save the films without any feeling of guilt as they'll have paid for them.
What's worse than instant gratification is wasting fossil fuels just to drive down the road to get data. That's much more selfish. Not to mention the petrochemicals involved in manufacturing the DVD and its case, then transporting it to the distributor and then transporting it from the distributor to the video rental store.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Interesting that nobody has commented yet on the proposed ability to rip a physical dvd onto an ipod that is apparently part of the fox deal. So how will it work? Will the dvd contain an ipod/appletv version of the movie wrapped in fairplay DRM, or will itunes insert it for you when itunes recognises the dvd as one it is authorised to rip?
...on iTunes, there will be at least 2 applications that will intercept or otherwise access the data and convert it to a more permanent format.
Almost certainly it'll be Windows only at first, but very soon thereafter, the Mac OS version will appear.
So what? It's actually FAR easier for me to just load up the movies that I rent from the video store right now and just rip it with Handbrake/Your Preferred DVD Ripper. I just don't care enough to do it. Generally I don't want to watch the same movie again so it's just a waste of hard drive space for me to keep it.
Now you're talking about an encryption that's significantly more of a PITA than CSS ever was. Apple will probably be updating it every two weeks to keep people out, so if I wanted to rip my rental stream I'd have to bugger around trying to find the latest version of whatever would remove that DRM.
It's different with music and movies that I own because I want to see them again at a later point, but rentals are by and large just watch-and-forget.
the rhapsody for the movie industry? It would be nice to pay a reasonable monthly subscription ($25) and have access to digitally archived movies from the 1920s until now. We need an all you can watch system in place now.
I have to wonder whether any company using this business model has actually done any market research into whether the target audience exists. It seems about as feasible as selling dog food for cats.
Geeks are into watching TV shows on their computers. Normal people (aka "non-geeks") are not. Normal people don't want to sit at a computer and watch a show, and they want it immediately rather than waiting for it to download. Normal people tend not to even have internet connections good enough to enable a "rent movies by downloading them" type of behaviour. Normal people don't have devices that allow them to watch TV shows on their computer on normal televisions, either.
So you would think that this is a service that will be targeting geeks, but...
Geeks tend to know what DRM is, and tend to oppose it. The idea of having a file on your computer that deletes itself after a period of time does not appeal to geeks. We can easily enough find and download TV shows and movies illegally anyway, so why would we choose to pay for something that is inferior and isn't free of cost?
So who is the target audience? The only people I know who will actually use this are hardcore Apple fanboys, and I don't think there's enough of them for this type of service to be worthwhile.
Man I can't believe your well moderated post got modded "flamebait". I guess that goes to show how hard core the "anti-DRMists" out there really are! If you even suggest that DRM might not be as evil as everyone makes it out to be, in a perfectly logical, well thought out post, you get ye olde slashdot FLAMEBAIT scarlet letter.
...all the limited-time and streaming-only music services have failed....
as far as I know, every attempt to deliver a pseudo-rental experience by providing a time-limited copy--as opposed to a physical copy that is physically returned--has failed.
All of the promoters of these schemes simply assert that consumers will perceive this as being just like a rental, only better because you don't have the inconvenience of having to return the copy.
But a decade of experience seems to show that whether consumers ought to perceive it that way, consumers in fact do not perceive it that way. They perceive it as a ripoff.
Why would anyone expect this venture to succeed? How, exactly, is it supposed to be different from the many predecessors, all using seemingly similar business models, all of which have failed?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This has been pretty obvious for a while now...
I'd be willing to spend a dollar or two for a movie, if I could watch it for more than 24hrs. Perhaps a week. In very high quality.
Umm... explain to me how a downloaded copy will be of higher quality than just renting a disc, particularly if you don't want it to take a week just to download the thing?
iTunes DRM has not been cracked in ages.
Nobody needs to crack it, because iTunes DRM is "honor system": iTunes will happily make a perfect digital unencrypted copy of an audio track for you any time you want, without QTFairUse, by burning to an audio CD.
Which I routinely do every time I buy a track from iTunes, because I took their advice about making backups of all my music to heart. Good thing too, when a couple of reinstalls on a bad system drive took me over the limit of authorizations... it was the only way I could play my music while waiting for them to remove my authorizations manually. If you (any of you out there) haven't made audio CD backups of your iTunes music, I heartily encourage you to start.
Yes, re-ripping will introduce some distortion if you don't re-rip to lossless... but I can't detect any on anything but classical music, and I haven't bought classical music on iTunes in years. I mean, really, if you care about quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs, or at least sticking to iTunes Plus tracks (which are, incidentally, DRM-free).
And the fact that there's not an easy equivalent for video is one reason I've only bought a few TV shows from iTunes, to fill in series I've missed. The video side of iTunes seems like a sideshow, really, music is where it's at.
I mean, Jobs keeps saying DRM can't work, and now this scheme which actually depends on DRM working.
Oh, one more thing...
The biggest problem I see with it is that Quicktime on Windows, well, it's got reliability problems and it's got performance problems. My wife downloaded some episodes of one of her TV shows and had to borrow my first gen Mac mini to watch them, because her *much* faster and more up-to-date Wintel box couldn't play them without cutouts... no matter what I did in upgrading drivers and reinstalling Quicktime and the rest of the Wintendo voodoo games.
It plays WMV and RM just fine.
Further, most people with digital cable or satellite have video on demand so sometimes renting a movie just takes a few clicks of the remote. I'll likely use this service when I travel for work. I can rent a couple of movies, load them on my iPhone and have something to watch at the airport and on the plane. I used to have to buy the movie when I wanted to do this, with these new rentals it'll become cheaper. Apple might be hurting themselves by doing this. I suspect I'm not the only own who buys movies from iTunes just to watch them once and will now choose to rent instead. Then again, if the price is right, I'll probably do it more often so they may get more out of me in the end. Time will tell.
FTTH, decent connections you know.
i happen to live in Seoul and get my Internet and IPTV through Hanaro, it's 100Mb/s service and movies stream after about 30 seconds of buffering. There is a pretty decent selection to choose from, from recent movies (Transformers, Next are 2 recent ones that come to mind) to stuff like Midnight Run and the Meaning of Life. Lots of Korean, Chinese and Japanese movies as well as s ome other foreign language films from countries like France, Spain, and Germany. It's not in 1080p quality but it's decent. Average new run movies go for about $2.50 US with 3 days to watch them (i guess some people would like 5, I usually just watch movies when I order them though, if they're pay-per-view flicks).
They're a little slow with foreign TV series, and they will charge for the real popular stuff like 24 or Heroes (like $0.40/episode). I don't have a problem with downloading TV shows though so...they can bite me on that.
My total cost per month with a 2 year contract is about $25 US.
Appropriately enough, my captcha for this post is "delivery" and they certainly do deliver.
Now obviously this system works well in Seoul due to high population density. There's no reason the same set-up couldn't work in the major urban centres in the States. [slight politcal rant]Except one: corporate greed. But don't worry, the free market will sort that out.[/slight political rant]
So yeah, that's how to do this kind of service right.
The word 'Rectal' didn't seem out-of-place, as these companies are known for delivering their messages that way.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Which won't work for DRM.
The basic premise in cryptography is keeping the key secret, exchanging them securely with the destination user while avoiding them to be catched by undesired 3rd persons.
With DRM, the problem is that the person to which you securely transmit the keys (the user, so he can watch his movie) and the person you're protecting the keys from (the user, so he won't make unauthorised copies) are the same person. You're supposed at the same time give the keys to the user and prevent the user from using them.
So the mathematical model behind private/public systems, etc could be perfect, that won't help a system like DRM which is broken by design.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I usually encounter the opposite situation.
My ex was studying psychology (not exactly a bunch of computer nerds).
We got her a MP3 player for Christmas. And somewhat later, for her birthsday I wanted to offer her gift-coupons for her to go and buy whatever CD she would like to rip and store on the player.
Reaction of all her co-students whom I asked to help ? "Why pay for something she can get for free on LimeWire ?".
So my experience is the exact opposite. For every effort that companies make to attract 1 paying customer, there's about 20 non-nerdy girls who don't give a damn shit and continue to download from P2P.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why is this exciting or news even?
In the non-iTunes reality, people have been renting Videos online for over 6 years more. Look up Vongo, Cinemanow, Movielink, as well as some of the subscription based music services that also allow limited video and music video downloads.
I like most people in the non iTunes wrapped world have been clicking my media center remote to grab the latest movie online from my chair for a long time now. Yes Media Center 2005 and Vista work great with online Video rental services, it is one of the reasons to pick up a remote for your computer even if you don't use the tuner and DVR functions of media center. (Let alone the online content access to stuff normally found on the old TVLinks sites automatically available inside Media Center)
The only news here is the Fox deal, not the 'renting' of freaking movies, even though it is a new model to Apple.
I know that 'owning' the rights to music is a great plan or getting access to stuff the Windows world has had for years is always exciting to Apple users and they think Jobs invents it everytime, but come on...
As for renting media, I pay my $15bucks a month to Napster or Rhapsody and have access to virtually every song ever made and reload my Creative Zen on a weekly basis with about 1000-2000 new songs. THis also includes loading my Theater computer, and the rest of my family's MP3 players with everything they could even want. How much would that cost in iTunes world?
I guess the part that kills me, is that I have avid iPod and iTunes friends that won't pay for subscription based music, but yet they pay for the deluxe TV/Cable package everymonth or have several XM devices they pay 20-30 bucks a month for, when they oculd be be podcasting and paying a music subscription service cheaper and getting instant access to literally millions of songs as faster as your connection can grab them.
I'm not a personal fan of the Zune, as MS's plans got screwed over by the wireless restrictions, but the model works better. Buy if you want and burn it to CD just like iTunes, or don't and just pay the subscription fee and get access to all their content on a monthly basis.
Consumers are finally taking notice of the 'cable bill' subscription concept and this is driving users to Zunes and non-Apple WMA based devices. Think of it this way, give your kids the option, I can buy you 4Gb Ipod that is cool, but you can only buy 10 songs a month, or I can buy a Windows PlaysforSure or Zune device and for the same money you can download everysong you ever wanted to fill the device.
Kids get the difference here, even if the Apple drones don't. Ipod is cool, but there is the high school and campus crowd of non iPod users that are considered in 'the know' that become more trendy with access to a larger selection of music and videos and movies and TV Shows without having to buy them.
Besides the geeks in the crowds that like the Zens and even cheaper Insigna 4gb players that have better audio support and better video quaility that even the most expensive iPod. Pick up a old Zen M or newer device and not only does the internal screen kill even the new iPods, but the A/V out is DVD resolution giving you a portable Movie jukebox to hook up at any friends house to watch movies on the fly.
I guess the whole iPod thing has left some of us geeks a bit bitter, as we have seen better devices doing what the iPod started years before the iPod, and continue to seen better sounding and more capapble MP3 devices from other companies, but once again Apple's marketing can turn average into spectacular. Maybe instead of bitter, we should just be in awe of Apple's marketing machine and go on our way and buy better quality devices cheaper than iPod with the horrible iTunes lock in 99% of the average users get sucked into.
Most other players will allow my video card to clone the video out to my HDTV and play it fullscreen. Quicktime doesn't do this. I'd rather watch movies and TV on a large screen than my 17" LCD.
...and the above is an excellent argument for a music subscription service, so you don't need to deal with the mechanics of preserving files.
I much prefer the Zune Marketplace Zunepass, and URGE before that, as a model. A fixed monthly fee, and I can download whatever I want, whenever I want. Last night I downloaded all of the Rock Band tracks, including most of the albums they were off of, and 85% or so of them were available via subscription (the Metallica stuff required a purchased download). Nice way to sample stuff without having to pay hundreds of dollars.
My video compression blog
...and the above is an excellent argument for a music subscription service, so you don't need to deal with the mechanics of preserving files.
That seems rather an odd bit of logic there.
Here I am with a music library collected over the past 30 years, containing quite a bit of music that's no longer in distribution, some of which will never be republished until it goes out of copyright, and the solution to backing it up is to prevent me from having acquired a permanent copy in the first place. Well, I suppose if you don't actually care about being able to listen to a song you like after your subscription expires or the company goes out of business, that might work.
Nice way to sample stuff without having to pay hundreds of dollars.
$15 per month, times twelve months per year, that comes to $180 per year. Let's see, my oldest iTunes purchases are from mid-2004. There's 261 tracks there, including the 15 I got for free with my iPod and a couple of dozen free downloads... oh, what the hell, call it $260. Add in about $60 worth of music from eMusic, and that's $320. Plus a hundred bucks worth of CDs... ok, $420. That's "hundreds of dollars".
But wait: if I'd been using the Zune service I'd have paid $450 and I'd still have to fork over another $15 if I wanted to keep listening to that music in January.
Throw in all the ripped CDs and tapes from the past 30 years, and the total's probably a few thousand bucks... but then 30 years of Zune would add up pretty quickly too.
Subscription music isn't cheaper unless you're using it like an FM radio. But then that's pretty pricey for FM. That's even more expensive than Sirius.
i couldn't agree more, there are only a handful of films i would be interested in owning. films are not music and the vast majority of them do not merit a second viewing, much less a third or fourth. as for the cd collection, i converted ninety percent of mine into cash when i suddenly realised i hadn't played a single one of them once in the year since i got my first mp3 player. i haven't looked back at the decision at all, just kept the really special ones and ditched the rest.
the real advantage of online service is in not having to step foot in a rental store *ever again*, they are certainly among my least favourite places of all time. i almost never go unless i know they have what i want-- if browsing i set a strict time limit before the inevitable headache begins and i start fantasizing about the murders of the desk staff.
What's the point of having a week for something you get with no delay at home? One week make sense for rental of DVD because you may not know when you're going to have time to watch the movie. But with on-demand, if you just "rent" the movie at the time you want to see it, what's the problem? Do you often watch movies in two or more sessions?
How bad is your network connection? I watch SD (DVD quality) movies off Xbox and rarely have to wait more than a minute or two before I can watch them. HD is another matter - it's typically a 30-45 min wait before I can start playing them (it tells you when enough is downloaded that you can watch it start to finish without running out of buffer). If anything the 1-2 min wait on SD content is a software issue where they are being overly cautious - because the content is coming down far faster than the playback rate.
Fwiw - SD in this case is about 3-4 mbit (VC1), HD is about 10-12mbit.
Comcast, typical cable modem connection AFAIK.
same ol'... same ol'
content right owners holding it up, just like the did with audio
I doubt that casual gamers connect their Xbox to the Internet/Xbox Live. I have a citation that 60 percent of Xbox 360 consoles have connected to Xbox Live. The same page states that 75 percent of Live users (45 percent of consoles) have purchased something in Marketplace. I doubt that many people would feel good about entering their credit card number into a game console. I know that points cards exist, but I doubt that many people (other than hardcore gamers) would bother to purchase those. True, statistics related to the Xbox 360 may show a hardcore bias that reflects that of the console. Wii is thought of as a more "casual" console than the 360, but in the first year of the Wii Shop Channel, Nintendo still sold $33 million in downloads.