“As the record labels learned too late, digital downloads are here to stay. Now it’s the studios’ turn to smarten up — or be left behind,” Ronald Grover writes for BusinessWeek. “Any movie mogul worth his private screening room knows that film downloads are next on [Apple CEO Steve Jobs’] to-do list. For months now, the Apple crew has been making the rounds trying to convince Hollywood execs to license their pictures. No luck yet, but the bearded visionary is nothing is not persistent.”
Grover writes, “So, wake up, Hollywood. What are you waiting for? Either let Jobs have your movies or — and this is a novel idea for any entertainment mogul — beat him to the punch with your own efficient, cost-effective way for consumers to get flicks off the Web… Hey movie moguls, you better act now, before you find yourselves singing the same iTune as the music business.”
Full article here.
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If I am going to buy movies online, I want the purchase to include both an iPod-compatible version and a DVD or near-DVD quality one, unless the price is less than $5 ($4.99).
MW: used, as in “I am not going to be used by the movie industry.”
Either let Jobs have your movies or — and this is a novel idea for any entertainment mogul — beat him to the punch with your own efficient, cost-effective way for consumers to get flicks off the Web
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acquisitionx.com
Good thing this will be a big bandwagon.
nah, won’t be worth it till it is DVD quality
Can you call stubble a “beard”?
The bandwidth on average is just not where it needs to be to make movie downloading practical. I think the step Apple has taken is the perfect combination of content and deliverability. Everyone expected the iPod to come out with video capabilities, but to throw in the availability of Disney/ABC programming on top of that creating a new distribution model for an entirely new industry was shear brilliance!
More content will be here soon, and movies will be next, in due time…
I think it really won’t be worth it until its Hi-Def… DVD quality (480p) is really wanting…
Besides….I thought 2005 was the year of Hi-Def?
MDN word: “hurry”
Most likely, the TV industry will jump onto Steve’s idea immediately. They lack all imagination and if any one of them has an ounce of intelligence, they will see the huge potential in this new TV distribution system. [ …much to the terror this has stabbed at the cable industry’s heart!]
Eventually, the movie industry will also join in once they realize that millions of people have high speed (and getting even faster) and can download their new releases faster than a movie exec can wipe his fat butt. Exactly like the music industry.
Those too stupid to learn from history deserve to relive it.
I guarantee one thing, if the studios do it, it won’t be Mac compatible. Anytime anyone corporate sets out to do anything with technology, they turn to the stooges they know, and those stooges only know one thing…
Microsoft.
If the movie studios don’t go with Apple, just how will they be left behind? They control the content, not Apple.
Where is Bit Torrent for Macs??
They’ll lose to the PC/P2P Way, the way the music studios have been doing.
Bandwidth IS here…
Guys, this is targeting early adopters, myself being one of them. Everyone in my neighborhood has 4-6 MB download for $39/month. Speaking with the Cox (Cable) installer, 1 in 4 homes have HDTV. I am aware that this is not typical, but don’t say the market isn’t ready….we’re waiting for it!
Here ya go, David O,
http://www.bittorrent.com/
MDN MW= worked
You wouldn’t have worked very hard to find it yourself.
for market entry excercises like this one, anyway.
For one thing .. low definition doesn’t stall out older processors. For two, it downloads faster. For three, few will care at this point .. they just want to see it happen.
Towards everyone that comments about needing DVD quality… the music files weren’t CD quality, and look how that turned out
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DavidO >
Or use Azureus, which is pretty good really.
Let’s be clear ..
I know several (3) people who had, quite intentionally, NEVER installed iTunes .. until last week’s video downloads announcements by Apple. Now? They are gawking around with notable frequency in the iTMS ..
The appeal of legally downloadable videos is certain.
Walking the 30 feet to my mailbox to get and return DVD movie rentals is getting a bit too much.
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Wake me up when I can RENT a HD version of a movie online with iTunes. I don’t want to own a movie I will only watch a few times, at most.
That’s because of the Hollywood’s increasingly outdated “windows” business model, in which studios first sell their flicks to theaters, then release them on DVD, and finally license them for TV. Movies are currently available for download somewhere between DVD and TV, so if you want to snag an online copy of, say … Batman Begins, you can’t. It won’t show up on MovieLink or CinemaNow until two months after its Oct. 18 release to Blockbuster and Wal-Mart….
Meanwhile, there are about 200 pirated copies of Batman Begins available on file-sharing service Morpheus. And while Morpheus has its flaws … [it has] no [usage] restrictions. The industry-backed sites come with more roadblocks than an action-film chase scene….
Ahh … the [time]-“windows” model….
Let’s see … first come the p2p pre-release rips, usually with some sort of watermark on the screen. Otherwise, when the movie hits the theaters we see cams in p2p: someone shoots the movie in the theater, sometimes with the person in front’s hair in the lower part of the screen. Then comes the dvd release and the rips from that on p2p. Then come the scanned covers in a variety of languages, including custom editions, the rerips in poorer quality, the personally edited subtitles because … well, the nuance is different….
Stevie knows that. He knows that a legal alternative to p2p can’t be overly restrictive, difficult or even expensive to purchase. It’s all about balance. Meanwhile, Hollywood frets about their delusional “windows” model. It’s not Stevie that wants to change the world. The p2p people have already changed it.
Canada would be a good test market for measuring the efficacy of legal video downloads as opposed to P2P. It’s legal to be on the downloading end (but not uploading) of P2P in Canada.
I say Hollywood should release everything they have .. and that they should do it in the Canadian iTMS exclusively. Then in a couple of years or so, they could let those thieving Americans in on the deal.
Ahahaha
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Hollywood is going with Microsoft DRM and Apple is not invited to the party. Lets hope Steve can convince them otherwise. But right now Hollywood seems to think they can do a store themselves, along with their partners. Basically it is going to be the same scenario as with music. Wallmart online, blockbuster online and all the studios will be selling windows only content.
What would hold Pixar back from an Apple distribution deal? If nothing else, it would make a great test venue.
Canada first wrote:
I say Hollywood should release everything they have .. and that they should do it in the Canadian iTMS exclusively. Then in a couple of years or so, they could let those thieving Americans in on the deal.
S’oB says:
Such brilliant logic from the country that gave us William Shanter!