“News Corp and its studio Twentieth Century Fox are close to a deal with Apple to begin offering new releases and catalog movie titles through iTunes beginning in early 2008, reports Pali analyst Richard Greenfield, in a blog post,” Rafat Ali reports for paidContent.org.
“He said the two sides are waiting till early 2008 prevents any impact to the all-important holiday DVD selling season. Disney is the only major studio with full catalog within iTunes for now, while Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM have partial catalog deals,” Ali reports.
“Apple appears willing to modestly increase the wholesale price paid above the $14.00-$14.50 that Disney has been receiving. Others may follow suit if Fox comes into the fold,” Ali reports. “One thing that remains unclear: whether the studios will allow iTunes to rent movies or create a subscription service?”
Full article here.
Are people insane? DVDs are selling for $3.99 when they are on sale. New releases are usually $12.99 at Target.
wow… about time!!!
Adios NBC. Hello 20th Century Fox.
Sounds like a good trade to me.
WindozeKiller,
Convenience, son. Convenience.
Oh, good. Now we can pay extra to download Dude, Where’s My Car?, Shallow Hal and Dr. Doolittle 2. Yay.
“Sleeping With The Enema” was a shitty sleeper…..
Movies won’t be successful without a rental service and HD quality.
The reason music sells so well is that consumers can avoid buying full albums and buy just the singles they deem worthy. I’ve bought hundreds of singles yet only one album because buying “just the good songs” usually costs less.
Movies take up too much space and aren’t as much of an impulse buy unless you’re traveling. Apple won’t sell many movies unless the prices are substantially cheaper than DVDs ($9.99).
“Trojan Horse” comes to mind, get the catalogue in now, develop a rental market that will produce sales at “Greased Lightning Speeds”, give Fox such a large wad, that they will be unable to reject the model.
Why?
People are used to renting films as opposed to buying to keep.
Those that opt to buy a film, will do so anyway, those who would not buy a film such as myself because watching a film once is enough, twice is more than enough, would rather rent a film.
Now, why did I submit this comment?
Re: Go Gators
Ditto
It will be good for Apple to sign up Fox. This area still needs to evolve however. Rentals make perfect sense to me. I doubt I would pay 15 bucks for a movie-to-own download.
Once HDTV becomes standard the industry should start to sort itself out.
I can’t see why the network and studios can’t make deals with every digital distrubutor and let the market decide whose approach works out in the end.
Hey maybe it won’t be Apple but someone like Netflix who gets it right.
Actual cost of driving is now about 50 cents per mile. Although I will need more storage for my Mac, downloading would save a little time and expense otherwise involved in the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. And I would have the benefit of taking a gander at the preview clips before I make my purchase decision.
Question: “Why are movie clips called ‘trailers’ when the idea is to see them _before_ you choose to see the whole movie?
It will be nice to not have to deal with DVDs anymore. If rentals come to iTunes, it’s on! Netflix was a good “substitute” for Apple TV for a while. HBO, Showtime, etc. Bye bye.
Say a rental is $2.99. Say you watch 8 movies a month. $23.92 a month.
Premium cable channels cost $40 or so all together, and there is never anything new or good on. Netflix is averages like $20 a month. That’s around $60 in movies a month if you have both (which a lot of people do).
Netflix sucks because a lot of times you are in the mood to see a certain movie or genre of movie while you are choosing movies, but by time you get them you are in the mood to watch something else.
DVDs suck because they add to the clutter of your house, they have to be shipped around, driven back and forth, etc. And most people don’t want to keep too many movies forever.
DVD players are another device in your system. Loading discs, ejecting them. Yuk.
It’s time for all of that to go bye bye. If rentals are for 30 days or something, then you could put them on an iPhone or iPod, bring them on a plane trip.
The interaction with all these clumsy devices has to come to an end sooner or later. When I first got the Airport Express (wireless music streaming router), I thought… There goes DVD players.
Obviously Fox wants my money.
Apple will offer rental service too…
Now give me a rental service and the ability to download through the iTunes wireless store, where the movie begins to play after about 5% of the data is downloaded.
I want 5.1 pretty please. Bandwidth be dammed. Lets get that 5.1 in there and at least 480P.
WindozeKiller,
right you are, and then after a year or so you can get more than half your money back when you sell the DVD over Amazon.
The same applies to CD’s, except that they often become collectors’ items and sometimes you get even more than the original cost back!
In the long run, when you buy DVD’s and CD’s you get much better quality for less money!
As much as I love Apple, for me iTunes store is only good for podcasts and the occassional audiobook.
People who buy music or films there are, financially speaking, shooting themselves in the foot.
Hmm – I can rent a DVD for a $1 / day at any Redbox kiosk, and .50 / day from my library. I’m willing to pay a SMALL convenience fee to get it “on demand” to my laptop/CPU, but not at the estimated markups the movie studios want.
We need to get Russ Meyer’s estate to release his library to the iTS.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462322/
Not Russ Meyer, almost…
I use both NetFlix and RedBox. But when I went next door yesterday to see if RedBox had anything I might want, I was out of luck. All day long I saw only this on the screen:
Windows XP Shutting down
This malware, it seems, follows us even when we want to escape.
720p24 movies please Apple, they will be USP over “near DVD” quality and justify the price.
Apple,
Either you put out p.d.q. some 624R quality, ASAP which uses that latest TQR over 14ST with interlaced fork shots. Nevermind that others transmit infrared tachyon flat screens.
Sheesh….I hate being in the 21st century.
one word
HD
“MDN Magic Word = “making” like making iTunes HD will get me interested in movies.
After getting Frontrow with my Leopard upgrade I decided to try it in place of my soon to be purchased Apple tv. I must say that the picture quality I got using a dvi cable to my 47″ tv is pretty good. I have two movies purchased from iTunes and plenty ripped with Handbrake.
I am now in the process of setting up a home server just for movies and hope that Steve will introduce movie rentals soon. My days of playing dvd’s are over because hard drive store is cheap. I can’t seem to rip the dvd’s I own fast enough. My digital home is coming together nicely.