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Disney Is Lone Holdout From Apple's Plan to Sell 4K Movies for $20 (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has signed new deals to sell movies in ultra high-definition with every major Hollywood studio except the one with which it has long been closest: Walt Disney. At an event Tuesday where he announced the new Apple TV 4K, the tech giant's head of software and services, Eddy Cue, said the device will offer Hollywood movies in the high-resolution format, called either 4K or UHD, for ultra-high definition. Logos for most major studios briefly flashed on a screen behind Mr. Cue, including Time Warner's Warner Bros and Comcast's Universal Pictures. Mr. Cue said those studios' movies will be available in UHD at the same price as high-definition movies. Participating studios have agreed to a maximum price of $19.99 for 4K movies, currently the highest price for HD movies, according to a person with knowledge of the deal making. Apple had pushed studios not to raise film prices above that threshold. The one absence from Apple's list of big studios selling movies in UHD is Disney. It wasn't immediately clear why the company behind Star Wars and Marvel couldn't reach an arrangement with Apple. It currently sells its films in 4K on other digital stores, such as Wal-Mart Stores' Vudu, for $24.99.
Disney recently announced they're pulling their content from Netflix soon as part of their own streaming service. I suspect avoiding Apple's deal is part of the same move.
They want more control over their content so they can charge more. I hope they continue to fracture, fail, then tank. That would be devine justice. Unfortunately, I don't think that'll happen because consumers are tools.
Let them fight. The outcome is going to be the same for us no matter who wins. The landscape will be in ruins and we will be left to pick up the pieces.
$19.99 is a lot of money for a movie, 4K or otherwise. Most of the time, when watching a film or any moving image, you quickly forget whether it's even in colour or black and white, as long as the video is free from artefacts.
The broadcast industry has effectively standardized on 720 compressed; most people can't tell the difference between DVD and HD and it's already cost them thousands to find that out. My humble opinion is that the hardware manufacturers got addicted to the consumer upgrade cycle and they're pushing 4K. Having made a certain number of industrial films, I can tell you that no-one is screaming to support 4k.
I suspect that this will drag on so long that the screen makers will jump to 8k before there's much consumer traction.
The uprezzing of content to four thousand px will take time and money to accomplish. If I were Disney or any other large owner of content, I'd probably want to be conservative as well.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I can only really notice the difference between 720 and 1080 when I'm explicitely looking for it, but while actually paying attention to the events on screen, I don't.
I dare bet this goes for most people except for the type of people who can also see the difference of $500 HDMI cables.
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I disagree. I was a rampant pirate a few years ago based on my feeling that the content producers refused to deal with me in good faith. Their DRM was an annoyance I wasn't willing to deal with to enjoy content that I had purchased. Their offerings were priced inappropriately. And they continued to feel as if I needed to consume on their schedule. I constantly told anyone who would listen that I would be happy to pay for reasonable access. During this entire time I did not pirate commercially available music. I treasure my CD collection. Bootlegs are another story...
Now I subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Showtime, and regular cable for the AMC, FX, and a few other apps. My monthly budget for content is easily $200 and I get to gorge myself on content all month long. I'm happy to pay for what I consume if they are willing to operate in good faith. If not, the market will provide.
Here are my questions I ask myself when buying a movie:
1) Do I Really like the movie?
2) Am I going to want to watch it a lot?
3) Can I spread the "cost" of the movie over the number of times I am gonna watch it enough to not wince when I am buying it?
That's it. And since #2 is dependent upon #1 it is really comes down to how well I like the movie. As the prices go up, the less likely I am going to buy a movie. As it stands now, there are only a couple movies a year at most that I am willing to buy.
In the meantime, I'll wait for it to show up on Cable. I don't even pay for any of the Premium Movie channels, because quite frankly, they don't offer me enough of the movies I want to watch to justify paying extra each month.
IMHO the Entertainment industry doesn't really understand there is a lot of competition for entertainment these days. They had better start making more compelling entertainment affordable or it will die a slow horrible death.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I was with a friend when we were looking at HDTV several years ago at Best Buy. A Bruce Springsteen concert video was playing on a 56" HDTV. My friend noted that he could see the wood grain on the guitar and then told me the entire history of that guitar. Too much info.
Some people are looking at the content, other people are fussing about the format it is presented in. If you have a rather poor aesthetic sense, it is completely reasonable to compensate for it by focusing instead on the resolution.
The copy of "Les Enfants Du Paradis (children Of Paradise) Marcel Carne (1945)" that I have is slightly less than VGA quality. It's still a masterpiece and worth watching.
I know people that can't tell SD from HD at all. The folks with 'younger eyes' that can probably are watching on a tablet and don't care so long as the stream doesn't require buffering.
Some other possibilities are that they have a small screen or sit some distance away from their big-screen TV.
Movie theaters, with their 20+ ft screens only run at 2-4k, so people already accept a relatively low pixel density as the state of the art. In my living room, we sit about 15ft from the TV and it's very questionable whether a 4k TV is discernible from that distance in all but the most monster-sized TVs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's an interesting question. I'm wagering that most parents aren't going to be willing to spend more for a 4K version of Moana when their kids are probably just as happy with the SD version, to be frank. As long as Disney sells the HD versions for $20 a pop, I'm sure that won't be a big loss. On the other hand, the Marvel and Star Wars properties lend themselves to 4K releases, but wouldn't enthusiasts prefer Blu-Ray discs to digital files at that point? I mean, assuming 60mbit download speeds (the standard tier from my cable company), it's nearly two hours to download a 50GB file, more than enough time for lots of people to drive to Target, buy a Blu-Ray for the sameish price as Disney wants for a 4K download, some popcorn, and a case of beer, and come home. Also, 50GB movies add up pretty quickly; it would take less than a dozen to fill up the hard disks for most standard Mac configurations. iTunes is required still due to the DRM (ruling out the use of Plex or other streaming server solutions), so a library of any consequence is going to require an external hard disk or three connected to a desktop with iTunes running. "Play via streaming!" seems obvious, but iTunes doesn't seem to allow that (admittedly, the Apple TV might). Even if it did, the bandwidth requirements for 4K streaming are rather high, making repeated viewings an uphill battle for Apple justify using as an avenue of first resort without Netflix's levels of peering. Now, the storage could be eased obviously, if the Apple 4K files are smaller than the selection I came across on TPB, but if Apple compresses more than a little bit, the resolution improvement becomes a tradeoff of higher compression, and again starts to favor Blu-Ray. For those who want to view a film on impulse, I would imagine that the HD releases are 'good enough'.
tl;dr: Disney content seems to me like something that would be 'good enough' in 1080p for most people. Between the transfer times and storage requirements for 4K iTunes downloads that aren't too heavily compressed to cease to justify the higher resolution, Blu-Ray probably still serves that niche better than downloads.
I just wait for the movies to go on sale for $5 to $10. I haven't paid full price for a video in years.
Not everyone sits two feet from a 60 inches TV. Some of us have smaller displays and sit at a reasonable distance.
#DeleteFacebook
The broadcast industry has effectively standardized on 720 compressed; most people can't tell the difference between DVD and HD and it's already cost them thousands to find that out
While I agree that most people don't notice the difference between DVD and HD, HD and 4K, it doesn't cost thousands any more to find out. It's hard to find SD equipment these days and a 1080p TV and a Bluray play will cost about $200 total at Walmart. A cheap 4K TV and an ultra HD Bluray will be more, maybe in the $400 range. Granted the TV will not be a major electronics manufacturer but the Bluray player might be.
The major problem is that most content isn't 4K these days and most people just upgraded to 1080p so there's not a real push to go to 4K yet. As people slowly replace their aging equipment then they'll get 4K equipment, but few people I know are rushing out to get it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not the cycle the manufacturers got addicted to. It was the first time in a while that the margins were sufficient. And margins were only sufficient because we're down to a few companies making them. The Chinese are going to be entering the market shortly so we'll see those margins dwindle. Which leaves them only one direction to go in if they want to keep making good money. Resolution.
It wasn't immediately clear why the company behind Star Wars and Marvel couldn't reach an arrangement with Apple. It currently sells its films in 4K on other digital stores, such as Wal-Mart Stores' Vudu, for $24.99.,
Considering that Disney has announced plans to create their own streaming service and will withdraw from Netflix by 2019, I would say it is quite clear. Disney will keep the contracts it has in place with existing streaming companies but will not enter into new contracts as it launches its own service. It probably will not renew any of the current contracts as well.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
disney cinemagic coming to basic cable $3/sub must be in the basic pack with espn.
apple 30% cut is to high for the mouse!
Why would this be modded down? Torrenting is the only appropriate response to bullshit like this.
Studios bitch and moan about piracy, then Netflix comes along, making getting the content you actually want to watch easy. Piracy goes down..
But Netflix is almost too good; no commercials,very low price, unlimited usage -- so consumers see the traditional content companies like Disney (ABC, ESPN, who knows what the fuck else) for the parasites that they are, and cut the cord.
So to punish Netflix and/or regain the eyeballs they feel accustomed to, they raise the licensing costs on Netflix -- and when that fails to work, they pull their content from the service entirely, all so they can create yet ANOTHER streaming service.
So after years of consumers hemming and hawing for a la carte TV; moves like this from Disney almost seem like a giant "fuck you" to their viewers.. Sure you can have your a la carte entertainment, but it's going to cost you even more, more due to needing to subscribe to several different streaming services. (Give it a few years.)
Or you can torrent. Or you can just not watch their insipid bullshit. But they really shouldn't cry foul when they try to set their prices far higher than the market is willing to bear, and the result is a return to rampant piracy.
Why does Disney think their content is worth more than the other studios?
Magic pixie dust, of course.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ultra 4k blu-rays run up to 80mbit with ~50 sustained being typical depending on content. That's a 5x difference in bandwidth.
There really needs to be a coherent metric for communicating quality to customers because right now anyone can claim 4k resolution and push it at any bit rate / quality they damn well please.
"4k" is meaningless. Resolution is irrelevant. Nobody can tell the difference between 2160p and 1080p unless standing up comically close to a jumbotron. Demand for improved quality is really customers not appreciating blocking and banding caused by content delivery being unwilling or unable to deliver sufficient bandwidth to support the lies they are selling.
When I saw this story on the front page I knew instantly that the first comment would be claiming that 4k is pointless.
Personally it's glaringly obvious to me, but maybe I'm some kind of eagle-eyed mutant. Sadly my super powers don't allow me to shoot lasers out of my eyes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FTFY. But don't worry, creimer - once you get your infosec certifications, you'll be making big-boy money and can afford some big-boy toys of your own.
Isn't Laurene Powell (Steve Jobs' wife) a significant Disney shareholder... she should pick up the phone and call somebody.
In the old days, Steve would have picked up the phone and called Bob Igor (current Disney CEO) to remind him what happened to Michael Eisner, the last Disney CEO who tried to stand up to him.
For those who do not remember, Eisner was fired when it looked like Jobs (then CEO of Pixar) and John Lasseter (CCO) were going to take their Pixar ball and go and play with someone else (Warner Bros); and Igor was brought in with one task: Do not lose Pixar. Disney's subsequent acquisition of Pixar made Jobs the largest single shareholder of Disney and gave him a seat on its board of directors - which is presumably now filled by Powell.
Anyway... Tim Cook, at Apple, should call Powell and ask her to call Igor, at Disney, and have a gentle conversation about the difficulty he might have in a few months when he submits his new streaming app for approval for the Apple iOS and tvOS app stores.
I think when he says "notice the difference" he really means "care about the difference." There was a massive difference between VHS and DVD, and everything since is noticeable but suffers from diminishing returns. If anything, it all just serves to remind you that what you're watching is far more important than what format it's in.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I'm sorry, but are you two blind? There is a clear difference from 480p to HD, and then again from 720 to 1080p. Even 1080p to 4K is noticeable. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you two are as old as fuck and don't have a clue.
I have perfect vision and can tell the difference between 480p and 720p.. but it's not huge.. 720p vs 1080p or 720p vs 2160p... not a chance in hell from normal viewing distance.
I can see compression artifacts quite clearly over 720p on cable but commercials always look amazing at the same resolution... go figure.
Besides differences in human vision between individuals and effective PPD (Pixels per degree) based on TV size and viewing distance another noticeable quality factor is quality of the TV's upscaler. I can notice a significant difference between playing 480p content at 4k from a cheap AML s905 vs sending at 480p native and letting TV handle it. Some TV's (e.g. Sony) have amazing upscalers and some don't.
I agree most people can't tell the difference between resolutions. (Quiz: Two of the major TV networks in the US use 720p cameras, two use 1080i cameras. Based on the TV you've watched, name each network's resolution.)
However, I also have a projector which throws a 150 inch image (almost floor to ceiling). 1080p looks like crap when enlarged to that size, and I'm anxiously waiting for 4k projectors to come down in price so I can replace my 1080p projector. (Quiz answer: ABC and Fox are 720p, NBC and CBS are 1080i. And if you're a sports aficionado, ESPN is also 720p.)
If they have another lackluster summer in 2018, the content producers might wise up.
Of course, they might not be able to afford a clue by then.
Deferring your financial ruin to a few months down the road isn't something to be proud of...
I paid off the lease balance on my iPhone 6s so I now own it outright. My iPod Touch (1st gen) lasted eight years before the batteries died. I expect the iPhone 6s to last that long. Since I'm a Sprint customer for 20+ years, I got a sweet deal on the newest iPad and my monthly bill is unchanged. I can either pay that off over two years or use my forthcoming Christmas bonus to pay off the balance.
Back in the 70's Disney refused to license out their cartoons at a reasonable rate. Instead they produced their own TV program that would once a week air one or two of them. Meanwhile their competitors at Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barberra were tickled pink to take a nickel from anyone who wanted to air their old library.
The result was that Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barberra cartoons were constantly playing during "kid time" (after school on weekdays and Saturday mornings). All kinds of new content was being created too, as fast as it could be shoveled out. Meanwhile hardly anyone was familiar with the Disney cartoon stable, because they hardly ever saw it. Entire generations of viewers can describe Bugs Bunny cartoons in minute detail, and couldn't care less about Mickey Mouse.
They almost entirely destroyed their brand by being so tight-fisted. So now they have to go buy properties that were sensible about trying to maximize exposure (eg: Marvel, Star Wars), but it seems they still haven't learned their lesson.
I don't think much of the pushback has to do with the fact that the difference isn't visible. The issue has more to do with whether people are going to try and use a different service at a higher price and less convenience to get 4K versions of Disney content.
To this day, most movies are only mastered in 2K, meaning that with "4K" you'll just be paying for digitally upscaled video without any added detail.
E.g. look at the IMDb box-office top 10 (as a proxy for new, popular movies), then check the Technical Specs for each movie. For the vast majority of movies, you'll see:
Only two movies on the current top 10 were mastered in 4K: The Hitman's Bodyguard and Logan Lucky. Even Spider-Man: Homecoming, which Apple used when announcing the 4K movie initiative is only mastered in 2K! This is ridiculous.
Sure, with the 4K movies you'll probably also get higher bandwidth, which directly translates to higher quality... but that property is completely separate from resolution, and upscaling to 4K will actually give slightly worse fidelity than if the same bandwidth was used to compress the original 2K video.
Disney has always been greedy to the point of being arrogant.
Their DVDs on the shelves were always higher priced and seldom discounted. $20 is too high for a children's movie.
Disney lobbied heavily and won passage of the "Mickey Mouse" copyright extension law that prevented Steamboat Willy and Mickey Mouse from going into public domain.
Disney's early films exploited public domain in which they mined stories no longer under copyright to make their own movies.
When traveling I had watched the Disney Channel in hotel rooms and was aghast at the sitcoms that portrayed grown adults as bumbling idiots and children rebelling against authority. Not exactly the role models I want my kids exposed to. The only show I found entertaining was Phineas and Ferb.
Disney used to be the beacon of wholesome entertainment for families. Not anymore. I haven't patronized them for years. If they want to take their ball home away from Apple's service, they won't be missed,
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Among the copyright holders and distributors (Apple, Disney, NBC/Comcast, etc.) mutual greed assures that no single site will offer the convenience, freedom from digital restrictions management, and respect for watching in privacy that sharing sites like The Pirate Bay do.
Among customers (particularly those on /.) who should know better than to do business with Disney: Doing business with Disney means feeding the organization that treats you badly on copyright law (another retroactive copyright term extension, more power for software proprietors to implement more digital restrictions management, anyone?). Your shortsightedness and unwillingness to put your choices in the context of something more important will reinforce Disney's strong seat at the bargaining table. This will adversely affect you even for using services you're (foolishly) willing to trade your freedom to get: more DRM-riddled temporary access to movies with plenty of spying.
Digital Citizen
You are the reason movies suck these days. You steal from those making movies and wonder why movies are so bad these days.
Every time you BitTorrent a movie, the next movie gets just that much worse in quality.
I hope you're kidding. In terms of effects and the actual work that goes into films, there's more money being spent on them than any other time in history, with the occasional Cleopatra as an outlying counter-example. "Oh, if only they'd been able to afford a good effects budget" is not something said in Hollywood.
Same for me. I don't own many on discs because I didn't rewatch them like I used to due to being older with lack of free time (struggling with the new releases and unseen old ones). I do rewatch them like from higher quality like from film, SD, VHS tapes, LD, DVD, HD, BR, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes, conspicuous consumption is definitely something to be proud of, when you're barely making subsistence wages.
Conspicuous consumption would be upgrading to an iPhone 7 RED, getting an iPad Pro, and then figuring out how to pay for it. A dilemma that several of my friends who make significantly less than I do are struggling with. One of them told me if I had gotten the latest iPad Pro (it didn't fit my budget), he would find it necessary to upgrade to the latest iPad Pro with a higher memory capacity to stay ahead of me. And Slashdotters think I have money problems.
Pointing to other people and saying "But I'm not as bad as them!" is pretty fucking stupid.
I'm frequently told by Slashdotters that it's impossible to live in Silicon Valley on $50K per year. I like to point out that there are people who make significantly less than me who also live in Silicon Valley. No, they don't commute two hours each way from Stockton. Silicon Valley has pockets of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, but there are plenty people like myself who live somewhere in between.
There's always bankruptcy!
It's hard to file for bankruptcy when your net worth exceeds your debt obligations.
You declared bankruptcy recently, you make a crap salary and live in an expensive area.
I declared bankruptcy in 2011. That was six years ago.
Obviously you do not have substantial retirement savings.
Retirement accounts are protected in bankruptcy.
[...] you spend the last 15 years of your life busting your ass as a wal-mart greeter, and eat lots and lots of cheap ramen.
What makes you think I want to stop working because I'm old? My 75-year-old father kept working during the 15 years of his "retirement" until terminal cancer took over in the last six weeks of his life. If you want to die faster when you're old, stop working.
If you see these heavy people going to the hospital frequently, how do you NOT pause to think, "That'll be me soon unless I make major changes in my health and lifestyle?"
These heavy people are heavier than me. I take up one seat, they take up two or three seats. I exercise, diet and don't listen to the naysayers. I've done that for 30 years. I'll do that for another 30+ years.
Hell, I'm still extremely satisfied with 720p and 1080p content. Extremely. 4K? I'd rather invest some money in something more meaningful. New synth or something. It's just getting ridiculous.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Especially when it comes to porn, 1080p is the top experience, but really 720p is more than alright also. The only problem is lower resolutions like 480p and 360p. That can really look bad. However, more than 1080p is also just imperceptible,
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
People with smaller dicks like to have bigger stuff. Simple. :) It is not about the quality, it is about dicks, really.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Spot on my friend! They should get worried about the content, not its resolution! I can really like a 480p film, but OTOH a 1080p film can make me say "WTF have I DL-ed this POS at all???"
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti