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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.
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.
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.