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Why There's No iTunes For Movies
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo would gladly pay a hefty monthly fee for immediate access to recent movies and TV shows — if someone would just take his money. In reality, he pays nothing because no company sells such a plan, and instead resorts to getting his programming from the friendly BitTorrent network.
It's under 'Movies' in the iTunes Store.
Well but the problem is... it's iTunes. I don't buy Hard- or Software from Apple. Why should I buy my movies from them. Completely neglecting the fact I can't even install their shitty software -of course.
So basically Manjoo is saying that copyright holders are obligated to make their works available to him in the format and timing he demands, or else he has the right to get them illegally?
I think we call can agree that current copyright is unreasonable and undemocratic (since it was bought for by the music/movie industry). But Manjoo's reasoning doesn't make a ton of sense either.
Interesting article. It seems that the studios etc. are wary of losing the guaranteed revenue that comes from the premium and pay-per-view TV channels. But what happens when these channels wise up to the fact that an increasing number of people are getting these films for free online? Will they become more reluctant to pay the studios for the right to show a movie that everyone's already seen via bittorrent?
Does anyone have any figures on how pay-per-view services are doing? I wouldn't be surprised to see that the number of people paying for the Hollywood blockbusters is on a downward trend as broadband speeds increase.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
There is one problem with it, and it is not the fault of Apple. Since the distribution rights are owned by a silly amount of silly people in a silly amount of different countries, those countries won't get movies distributed in iTunes.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels. Basically they are assholes twice over. First to their customers (us), and then to their shareholders (why aren't we making money? Oh, because the distributers are assholes who don't want to *sell* our products).
Set the distribution rights free, drop DRM, and make the products available in the preferred way (internet, and no, that do *NOT* mean through some crap IE webbrowser crap solution with sub par quality), yadda, yadda, yadda. Most of you guys on slashdot gets this.
The only thing I pirate are episodes of a TV series, it only started showing here about a month ago (5 months after it started showing in the US). At the end of the first series I bought the DVDs of the season, and I intend to do the same for the second. I've tried to find a legit way to watch it, mainly because I would like to contribute towards the ratings of the series. I've tried watching it through NBC's website, Amazon, Hulu, and many other websites but no one will offer it to viewers outside of the US.
I'm a fan of the show, I want to watch it legitimately and if I could I would pay to do so.
It just goes to show how far behind with the times the entire industry is that people *want* to pay them and can't, so they break the law instead.
The answer is twofold. First, the vast majority of people will not pay a hefty monthly fee for immediate access to recent movies and TV shows. So there really is not market for it. You cannot compete with free by putting a "hefty" fee on it. God, that's fricken ludicrous. Why is this completely asinine idea even posted here?!
Second, the movie industry makes a lot of money with its gated approach to releasing movies. First, to theaters. Then to premium TV channels and pay-per-view. Then to DVD/Blue-ray. Than the normal TV. If the studios started releasing new movies as soon as they were released in they theaters, or even soon after, the money from the premium TV/pay-per-view/DVD/Blu-ray releases would drastically decrease. It's all about making the Benjamins, not about making it convenient for the viewer.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Sounds like a bug with the user.
Apparently they see some magic gain in *not* making their product available in *preferred* distribution channels.
It's not magic, it's real money. Follow the entertainment trades like "Variety" and you will see that the studios are selling nice lump-sum deals for some movies into broadcast and cable distribution windows even before they hit the theaters. The domestic and foreign TV distribution channels are not going to pay this big money if the movie is widely distributed in one form or another prior to their contracted window of distribution. The studio *must* restrict online distribution -- or at least make a big show that it is trying to. It's part of their contractual obligations.
When a studio gets confident that the money it can make via "easy early global online" distribution will be enough to off-set the reduced fees it can charge its "old school" distribution partners, believe me, they'll pull the trigger on it. But the old school guys pay big bucks, and, currently, the new skool online direct-to-consumer model is, literally, pennies.
I must have missed that 'iTunes for Linux' release announcement...
for Linux, how about on OpenBSD for SPARC?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Mods on crack, asking him why he doesn't like something is not flamebait.
internet, and no, that do *NOT* mean through some crap IE webbrowser crap solution with sub par quality
It also doesn't mean iTunes. Sorry, iTunes may be great software, but it is not the web, and not everyone has or wants iTunes.
DRM is only part of the problem, and getting rid of it is a great step forward. Now let's see this the rest of the way -- just the Internet, or at most email -- better yet, publish that website as a REST API to allow anyone to develop an iTunes-like client.
HTML and FLAC over HTTP for the win.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
spelling: s/fare/fair/
My ISP offers a movie service, BUT you have to install a proprietary player to play the movie on.
I'm a customer, I want the option of having the product as a .avi but the service is not giving me the service I want and am willing to pay for.
So I use The Pirate Bay, money has nothing to do with my decision Movies cost nothing anyway even on DVDs it's all about the service. The Pirate Bay simply provides a better service than the studios can so they get all my downloads.
Considering how big the market for movies is that must be a fair bit of money they are missing out on, all because they want people to use a certain piece of software.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You cannot TEND to boycott something.
Actually, it is precisely Apple's fault. If they didn't make their formats proprietary, then the choice of operating system would not make a difference.
It's not a very fun option. And it's just as beneficial to the movie/music companies as piracy is.
Apple does NOT use "proprietary formats" for its iPod, that's just FUD spread around by people who never even tried one.
The iPods are compatible with MP3, AAC, DRM'ed AAC, Apple Lossless (yes that one is proprietary but since it's lossless nothing would prevent you from converting back to something else later on, such as FLAC), MPEG-4, H.264. I may even have forgotten a few formats (such as Audible, but if that one is proprietary I don't think it's from Apple).
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand. Let go of this useless obsession and learn to use metadata on your files. You'll probably even like smart playlists once you start using them.
As for your friend, he probably won't be able to buy a car in a decade or so (...just kidding).
Actually, iTunes is barely mentioned in the article. iTunes was inaccurately mentioned in the story headline, apparently to start a flame war among the various flaming fanboys. I'm outta here - apparently someone's letting the new intern approve stories.
The problem is the protocol used to communicate between ITunes and the server. If it was open it would be possible for third party users to implement their own linux interface. I don't se why Apple would have a problem with that. You would still buy the music from them, and it would not cost them anything.
Read something like Terry Ramsaye's "A Million and One Nights," about the early history of the movies--up to the early twenties--(Ramsaye doesn't believe the talkies have much of a future)--and, to a technical guy like me, it's incredibly boring.
It's all about complicated business maneuvers based on artificial restrictions. (The phrase "B movie" dates back to the days when distributors wouldn't rent a good movie to a theatre unless they agreed to rent a lousy movie too). The various Laemmles and Selznicks and Zukors are doing nothing but finding clever ways to restrict product flow, cutting complex deals to outdo each other.
The movies themselves are sort of a byproduct of the real industry, which is business deals. The movies are sort of a necessary evil, like the chips that are needed at a casino. Who cares who designed the chips, or whether the artwork on the chips is great or mediocre?
Patents, too. Patents and patent pools and trusts and cartels, the whole nine yards.
Why is the movie industry associated with Hollywood rather than New Jersey? No, it's not because of reliable daylight. Anyone old enough to be familiar with the little loop of film in a camera or projector that buffers between the intermittent motion at the film gate and the smooth motion of the reels, so the claw doesn't need to pull against the inertia of the reels and tear the film? You need that if you want to put the film on reels and run continuously for more than a couple of minutes.
Well, that's the famous patented Latham Loop, and the people that held the patent refused to sell cameras, only rent them at exorbitant costs. So a bunch of people decided to make movies with pirated, illegal cameras... and they did it in California to make it harder for the process servers to find them.
Printing has always been about making books cheap and available... starting with the Bible. Movies have always been about restricting product. It's in their DNA.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
How about buying something else than an iPod then?
You don't see me complaining on slashdot that Nintendo won't make Metroid Prime for the Playstation 3.
> You do understand that you can use iPods (as well as many other players) without having to use their proprietary formats, right?
This isn't about someone complaining about music. This is someone complaining about Movies.
iPods are very picky about what they will play when compared to other devices.
This leads to the consumer needing a special purpose app just to deal
with it rather than taking a generic converter and using it's defaults.
If iPods were as picky about Music as they are about Movies, most people
would conclude that they were proprietary.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Both Amarok and Rhythmbox support standard metadata in files. Even the metadata that iTunes uses in all its supported formats are standards (mostly, all programs tend to throw in one or two extra fields that only they use).
Ordering by filenames are nice if you only want to store the song names and artist, but many people prefer to have more information than that.
Also, if you're manually tagging songs, then you're doing it wrong. We have this amazing thing called "the internet" now, and it has massive amounts of useful and searchable information on it. Many programs connect to this "internet" and retrieve information from it automatically.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
http://blog.adaniels.nl/articles/iphone-amarok/ would appear to indicate otherwise.
Unless the information there has become obsolete, you need to manipulate the device (at least the 'touch' generation of iPods) in a way Apple has taken steps to prevent you from doing. Generally I'd feel uncomfortable buying a device which has been designed to restrict how I can use it (even if the cost of the device is subsidised because of those restrictions).
So you are saying, rather than buying an MP3 player that does all this properly without installing bloatware (such as my Zen or my Sansa), we should cripple ourselves to satisfy the apple fanboys on /.?
This place is always against proprietary, unless its apple proprietary and then BEND OVER BABY!
m4a is proprietary to Apple? Since when?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I have a "stick up my butt" because i find it ridiculous that ANY company should be the defacto standard. The crowd here gets pissed off that Microsoft pukes all over the OS world but is okay that apple does the same thing with MP3 players and that's perfectly okay because "its Apple!"
Fuck that, Apple is just another Microsoft, and the reason people don't see it is this weird blindness people get when the "in-thing" is around. Don't look at it for what it is, essentially an MP3 player with bloated management software (for which Sony is repeatedly trashed for, but then, they are Sony and not Apple).
People pick their Presidents and their cars the same way now.
http://blog.adaniels.nl/articles/iphone-amarok/ [adaniels.nl] would appear to indicate otherwise.
That applies to the iPhone not the iPod. Well, technically it applies to the iPod touch, but that's not a normal iPod it's really just a crippled iPhone. Here is Amarok's supported iPods list. You'll notice they're all listed as working, except the iPhone and iPod touch, which work partially.
Unless the information there has become obsolete, you need to manipulate the device (at least the 'touch' generation of iPods) in a way Apple has taken steps to prevent you from doing. Generally I'd feel uncomfortable buying a device which has been designed to restrict how I can use it (even if the cost of the device is subsidised because of those restrictions).
Wait you want to buy a locked phone, restricted to one network by the demands of the network provider. You further want to buy a device that plays video and works with mainstream offerings of that video, but you don't want the provider to implement the DRM required by those selling the mainstream offerings?
The facts of doing business in the US are simple. If you're going to do business with the MPAA and cellphone providers you're going to have your device locked down and that will cause problems for people who want to use it in ways most people don't (installing music without using the software designed to interact with the device). What's interesting is this used to be the case with music and the RIAA as well, but that is no longer true, largely because of Apple's ability to leverage their market influence to that end. (Mind you this was also in their own financial best interest, I have no illusions they did this out of altruism).
My answer for you is simple. If you want a device without restrictions, buy a simple MP3 player like all the models of iPods except the Touch. If you want something that is more capable of other functions, lobby the government to rein in the corporations that require restrictions on devices. Apple sure doesn't want them, since they're making money selling hardware and every restriction means some people wont buy said hardware or will buy it then cost extra money with support calls trying to get it to work because of the unnecessary complexity caused by the restrictions.
So you are saying, rather than buying an MP3 player that does all this properly without installing bloatware (such as my Zen or my Sansa)
1) Your Zen or Sansa lacks a lot of features iPods have. Last play time/date, skip count, play count, and so on, that all two-way sync back to itunes. And I use this meta data heavily to generate smart playlists that automatically rotate tracks to the ipod etc.
Some of that stuff needs a separate database.
Sure it would be better if that database were open instead of proprietary. But quite bluntly, until someone defines an open standard, and Creative and Sansa step up and implement it, the iPod will remain my mp3 player of choice.
2) I don't -want- to manage my music library by dragging dropping files around. I do -want- to manage it by creating smart self-updating playlists based on meta data including play history, song ratings, and so on, and to have that automatically sync to the device. So installing a piece of software to handle the sync is something I'd be doing even if I didn't have to.
we should cripple ourselves to satisfy the apple fanboys on /.?
Using a Zen or Sansa is crippling yourself.
This place is always against proprietary, unless its apple proprietary and then BEND OVER BABY!
There are a lot of things I don't like about apple. I don't currently own a Mac because they refuse to release a tower with anywhere near the specs or price I want. There even a lot of things I don't like about itunes. But I've had other mp3 players... Sansa, Yepp -- the iPod is, for me at least, the best device hands down.
And this is also a major problem. Once you pay for the DVD, you should be able to watch it. Period. DeCSS would have never been necessary if the industry didn't insist on being Nazis about this. What exactly have they gained by their hardline stance?
Using a Zen or Sansa is crippling yourself.
I would recommend Zen or Sansa to anybody over an iPod. I don't hate iPods, they're decent players, but the other two companies just build better-working players. I've never had to do TECH SUPPORT for a friend to get their Sansa working, or move their music to a new machine, etc; I have had to to that with an iPod.
You can have your favorites, and if you like the iPod better, that's fine; but you're blatantly wrong if you try to can claim as a fact that those other players are "crippling yourself". Reasonable people can disagree.
>>Fuck that, Apple is just another Microsoft, and the reason people don't see it is this weird blindness people get when the "in-thing" is around
Gosh, I really am tired of this argument. I think it's annoying because when you say that someone bought something just because it's the 'in thing', you are telling that person that they are so stupid that they don't know what they want, don't know why they want what they want, and in fact want stupid things.
My iPod is not a slap bracelet or zubaz or a mullet. It's a tool that I use to get something done (it plays music for me). I don't use it in public. Only one of my friends owns an iPod besides me. In addition, it comes with tools for managing and aquiring music, videos, podcasts, games, and other stuff.
Maybe, just maybe, you could get off your high horse and admit that some people aren't fucking idiots and consciously chose iPod over something else for good reasons. You want a car, I want a truck, and I don't need to hear your theories about why owning a truck makes me a trendy redneck asshat. Some people buy trucks because they're remodeling their house and can't fit lumber and sheetrock in their geo prizm.
Sorry to pick on your post but I am pretty sick of pretentious trolls considering anything popular to be crap.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Then don't format the iPod using a Mac -- format using a PC. In fact, iPods come formatted by default using FAT. FAT formatted iPods can be used for both. iPod's (except for the Touch/iPhone) are just seen by the OS as a mass storage device. Windows doesn't support HFS natively. If you have a third party HFS driver then you can use a Mac formatted iPod with Windows.
And we all know that the majority of people get their music from iTunes and not from their own CD's or from p2p networks.....
So exactly how do I subscribe to podcast, automatically sync only unplayed podcasts back and forth between the player, start listening to a track on my computer and finish on my player without losing the spot, set up smart playlist, set up multiple playlist with some of the same songs without the songs being duplicated on the player, etc.. using drag and drop?