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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Agreed. $25 or even $20 is too much. Take it down to $10 and then I'll seriously consider buying it. I almost never watch a movie twice (most aren't worthy of a second watch), so unless buying is not significantly more money than renting a movie, I'll just stick with renting.
It is cheaper to buy the movie the week it comes out on disc (about $20 for the BD) than take the family to the theater. If I don't like it or think I won't watch it again, I can sell it to FYE.