Apple Pushes Studios to Offer 4K Content for Upcoming Apple TV at Lower Prices, Report Says (bit.ly)

Apple appears to have ambitious plans to attract people's interest in its streaming device Apple TV, according to a new report. An anonymous reader shares a report: The company, which is widely expected to refresh the Apple TV next month to bring support for videos in 4K, is in talks with Hollywood studios to bring Ultra HD content at lower prices, WSJ reported on Tuesday. Apple is widely expected to unveil new iPhone models - including one called the iPhone 8 - next month. The publication reports that the iPhone-maker is pushing Hollywood studios to agree to sell Ultra HD editions of movies at $19.99, the usual price the company charges for full-HD of new movies. But Hollywood studios, which have seen a significant portion of their business go to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, are pushing for higher prices. Hollywood studios, according to the report, are asking Apple to increase the asking price from proposed $19.99 per movie by $5 to $10.

Comments

Netflix

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

"Hollywood studios, according to the report, are asking Apple to increase the asking price from proposed $19.99 per movie by $5 to $10." Pushing even more people to Netflix...

Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope Apple stands firm on this because the average person is not going to pay more for UHD content to be streamed.

Streams are not as good as buying the Disc, and doubly so for 4K and beyond, this is due to the compression. Every time we get an increase in resolution it has come at a cost of the color fidelity because we're still doing 4:2:0, so all increasing the resolution does is make the slices smaller so we don't see the compression artifacts as readily. But what Cable and Streaming sources (eg Netflix) have done is scaled back the compression from what is supposed to be a 25Mbit stream to a 6Mbit stream. 4K at 6Mbit is gross. Unless we're going to be permitted to download UHD Blueray quality, paying BD prices for non-BD content is just not going to happen. Instead of buying 10 movies per year, it will just be cut back to 5, and the rest will be "watch on netflix"

Re:Greed

[DontBeAMoran]

The 6 Mbit stream is compressed; it gets upconverted to a 25 Mbit stream before decoding.

What kind of nonsense is that? Do you understand how video compression works? Take a 4K picture, compress it to a 10KB JPEG and then "upconvert it" to 4K again, it will look like shit.

Re:Greed

[Gr8Apes]

The 6 Mbit stream is compressed; it gets upconverted to a 25 Mbit stream before decoding. Most people will not be able to sense a difference

If you have 20/100 vision and don't wear any glasses, maybe. Otherwise you'll definitely notice a difference in relatively standard 1080p material visually, and don't forget the sound. A TrueHD stream itself is roughly 5Mbps. Converting to Dolby II 5.1 without too much loss results in about 1.5 Mbps, so your 6Mbps stream is now 4.5 Mbps video, which is about the limit for non-artifact simple cartoons with simple color palettes and stationary backgrounds. Movies with panning views including complex landscapes will easily eat up 12Mbps at a reasonably compressed rate with minimum artifacts, not including sound. Compare that with Cable (TWC does about 5-6 Mbps) or U-verse (6-8 Mbps) and you'll see why OTA (9-13 Mbps) is a better picture even though it's 1080i. All of those use DD 5.1 sound at most, so you lose 1-1.5 Mbps to sound. BluRays are between 28-35 Mbps and many have TrueHD or equivalent lossless sound. And yes, there is a different between TrueHD and DD 5.1. Of course, that makes no difference if you're only using the stereo TV speakers.

I only mention all that to contrast it with the requirements of 4K video, which has 4 times the potential content. Yes, H265 does a better job at compressing it, but you can compress 1080 with H265 as well, and in fact, my limit numbers are based on H265, so it's an apples to apples comparison. The 4K disks run about 70GB per movie. If you think you can compress that down to an acceptable 6 Mbps stream, well, I have some ocean front property in LA to sell you, just come at low tide.

Re:Greed

[houghi]

What they do is edit the 1080p to see how it works and then run the editor on the 4k image. That way the compiling of the image is done in the background.
If you actually down scale it and then edit it, you should not upscale it again, because you will not have done the following:
1) Paid for 4K camera that you do not need
2) Waste time downscaling to 1080p
3) Lost all the advantage of images in larger scale
4) Waste time upscaling

There are people who film in 8k, only so the information they have is better to have when they downscale to 4K, not to upload 8K, although some might still do that to show off.

ALWAYS edit the largest image with the most info and then downscale. Do not upscale, because that is useless.

Re:Greed

[DontBeAMoran]

And this gives us gems like this one.

$25 for a 4K movie... seriously?!

[__aaclcg7560]

I got news for Hollywood... I usually pay $5 to $10 for a HD movie on iTunes. Since none of my PC monitors are 4K, and I don't have an Apple box for my 4K TV, I'm not interested in paying extra 4K video. Apple will eventually discount the 4K movie to $5 to $10 anyway.

Re:$25 for a 4K movie... seriously?!

[AmiMoJo]

$10 is way too much for a movie. Maybe $5 for a good one a few months after release, in 4k, mkv format.

Netflix is only twice that for as many movies and TV shows as I like for a month. Okay, it's streaming, but your DRM infested crap will surely commit suicide one day anyway, or I'll ditch Apple and it won't play on Kodi.

$/resolution is becoming asymptotic?

[enjar]

When I was a kid, there was still some black and white content, and it wasn't uncommon to see a black and white TV set from time to time. Then things went to all color and standard definition. HD came out and there was a big WOW moment that created a compelling reason to switch over, helped by the broadcast changeover from analog to digital. Blu-Ray won the format war and it's only a little better than DVD, but it's not so much better that if I can only find a movie in DVD format I would skip it. From what I see, 4K is a little better than Blu-Ray but not the same as going from SD to HD. And a lot of the content I'm getting is streamed, anyway, so it can buffer and have compression artifacts. I guess if I was planning on getting some ginormous screen soon it might matter, but honestly the 42" size screens are "good enough" and we have better ways to spend money than to upgrade for only an incremental benefit.

Netflix showed competive pricing draws numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Holywood just never learns. You cannot price digital content even higher than physical media. People will and do vote with their wallets. This d-move will be followed by much wailing about how "piracy is killing the movie industry". Yes, if you spell piracy G R E E D, then there's a case to answer.

Just a waste of money

[sentiblue]

I'm a very long time user of iTunes and I don't think the 4K quality of video will justify the additional costs.

Over the past 10 years, I have purchased nearly $10K worth of entertainment including shows/movies/music... but only chose SD videos, not even HD. SD video may seem a little bit old, but still high quality enough for my family to enjoy. The additional cost of 25% on HD wasn't necessary. Now they wanted to add another 20% for 4K. I don't think so.

The difference between SD/HD is very visible, but can anybody honestly tell me that they can use their own eyes to distinguish the difference between HD and 4K? So why pay for the extra cost?

Fundamental Problem with Hollywood

[danbert8]

If the story isn't worth $20, more pixels sure isn't going to sell it... Neither will a 3rd dimension.

Selling AppleTVs vs selling movies...

[zarmanto]

There are clearly some conflicting agendas, here. Apple wants the $20 price point, because that's already the target price for most new movies; thus, they would be able to justify contract language which allows them to upgrade recent movie purchases which were made in that price bracket to the new 4K versions, making it a very attractive bullet point during their pitch for the new AppleTV. I'd even wager that the stage script has already been crafted; perhaps something along the lines of, "So you might ask, how much am I going to pay for all this new 4K content? I have good news! If you've purchased new movies from us recently, you probably already have some 4K movies, just waiting for you to download!"

In contrast, the movie studios all want to sell you brand spanking new 4K copies of all of the movies you already bought... at $25 to $30 a pop. "Upgrade? What on earth are you talking about? Who cares if you already bought the 1080p version? That was yesterday -- this is today! Either buy the 4K movie or don't, and that's my final offer. Geez -- what do these people think... that us movie studios are just made of money?"

Ummmmm... well, actually...

720p is perfectly fine

[OYAHHH]

1080 is okay, but I wouldn't pay more for it over 720. 4k? Every demo I've seen of it it looks like someone has put a video through an extreme sharpening filter. It doesn't look natural.

Why set prices?

[spinitch]

Why are good and bad movies same price ? Let studios decide. Often good movies at HD are more expensive initially but later when no longer popular since early viewers watched then prices drop. Likewise bad movies should be cheap sooner though they do come down faster than the popular movies. $20 for a stream approaching a DVD/ BD price another challenge but streaming on demand so convenience offers some differential value.