“After conquering the digital music biz and taking the lead with TV shows online, Apple is looking to feature films,” Ben Fritz reports for Variety.
“The computer company is in active negotiations with most major studios to add movies to its iTunes Music Store, most likely by the end of the year, numerous sources confirm,” Fritz reports. “The main sticking point is price.”
Fritz reports. “Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has been personally involved in the talks, initially proposed selling all films at a flat price of $9.99 — an offer the studios flatly rejected. ‘We can’t be put in a position where we lose the ability to price our most popular content higher than less popular stuff,’ said a studio exec close to the negotiations.”
“Studio sources expect an iTunes moviestore to debut by the end of the year at the latest,” Fritz reports. “Many predict feature films will bow on iTunes at the same time the video iPod with a bigger screen more appropriate for films is launched. But Apple is remaining tight-lipped, not even telling potential studio partners about its hardware plans.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “bjh” for the heads up.]
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Report: Apple in negotiations with movie studios; $9.99 feature films coming to iTunes soon? – June 19, 2006
9.99 seems like too good a deal, but here’s hoping…….
Until I can download a 1080p HD file, and play it out of my iPod to HDTV… I just don’t care
Who freaking cares whether it’s $9.99 or $29.99? I don’t want to buy my own personal copy of every movie I watch. And until Apple or anybody comes up with a laptop with enough storage to save an entire movie collection, this is just Such a Dumb Idea. I just want to pay a monthly fee like I do on NetFlix to watch all the movies I want. And if I ever do decide to build up my own personal movie collection, it sure as hell won’t be 320×240 copy-limited versions.
Apple will win this, Steves system works.
give the movie studios what they want. multiple pricing.
9.99 for new releases and 5.99 for older movies.
for a low resolution movie like the ones they sell on itunes, they
should be happy people still buy them.
I don’t mind having a library of movies, as long as the quality is high enough to replace DVDs.
Of course, download times for such files might be too much for the average consumer and studios clearly would not want DVD quality copies that they will say would hurt their DVD sales and lead to piracy. Nevermind that with the correct pricepoint they could have a similar or higher profit margin on downloads compared to DVDs. Or that iTMS has shown that the right pricepoint will provide consumers incentive not to pirate because it is simpler to pay and avoid the pain of P2P (truncated files, poor file quality, viruses, spyware, and adware for Windows users, long, painful downloads, etc). Of course, the real reason is that they want to sell you the DVD and the download. The DVD for home viewing on the TV and, because ripping of DRM’d DVD illegal, the download your portable copy.
I don’t really see the size of laptop HDs as being an impediment. Leave the entire collection on your home server and put 10 on your laptop for the trip.
I agree with Jeffrey, movies aren’t music…while you can download “throwaway” video like tv series, the motion picture market has no business or demand on an iPod.
If it stays the same as the current video, I feel $9.99 is close or slightly too much for 320 x 240 high compression video. Especially when I can pay $15-$20 for 720 x 480 DVD or a hair more for 1080i HD blue-ray or HD-DVD these days. I personnally think $6.99 is closer to the value it should be.
I agree with Jeffrey. Since I bought an HDTV last year, sd broadcasts and dvd’s are not as compelling to watch anymore. I have stopped buying dvds (rent only). Waiting for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. I will not get anything unless its highdef…..
Escaport…
care to fill us in on WHERE you are purchasing movies in Blue-Ray or HD-DVD format? or ANY movie in 1080i? ESPECIALLy in the 15-20 dollar range.
It was my impression that there were no movies on wither format yet. No?
Here’s what I think… If steve bends to the studios on movies, what will happen when he has to renew with music? they will want the tier system too. $5.99 for that new Chili Pepper’s song.
$9.99? You can buy almost every DVD you want for less than $7 if you know how. (new) I can’t imagine paying $9.99 for a crappy quality download, I can barely get myself to pay $7 for a DVD knowing BluRay is near.
I think that the studios will price themselves out fo the market if they are not careful. As stated by others, I will not spend $15-20 for less than broadcast quality. If they want to charge regular DVD prices, they better give DVD quality. Me thinks that the studios are getting very gready here since the downloads have no distribution costs and no packaging costs.
I do not understand why people want to own movies. I seldom want to watch one more than once. Even when I do a second time will do me for years and years.
That being said, why would I leave Net Flix, even at $9.99 a pop?
Make them cry “Uncle” Steve.
Missing the boat?
Is not renting more profitable than selling movies? Netflix, all those Blockbuster mall stores – that’s a fortune in lease costs…
I can only assume consumer movie sales is where retailers and distributors (Warner, Sony, etc…) make the high margins, thus selling movies vs. renting is where they want to play…
I can equally assume, Apple will virtually give away the movies in order to sell more iPods and/or home theater (eMac = entertainment Mac) devices…
EU: Of course, the EU wishes to destroy a model people keep choosing (iPod/iTunes) over other “open” models. The EU is hoping to defeat FairPlay DRM, which would of course lay the groundwork for the EU to dictate to Apple “You do the same lock-in game with your OS. So until you sell your OS to work on any Intel-based box, you can’t sell a Mac or OS bundled in our Communistic – eeerrrr, Socalistic free world!…”
Overall, Hollywood had best go with an initial Apple dictated model (or close too) in order to successfully launch legal online movie downloads, and quit squibbling over money they don’t even have yet.
One concession Apple could make is a two-tier pricing model:
Stnd Def (720 x 480 CD Quality range): $9.99
HD (1080i): $14.99
This would be a concession to the industry to some extent, and give consumers some version of choice. Looking at it technology-wise, storage would cost incrementally more for the HD version, while margins for the studio’s would be much higher, a model they may agree too.
As for downloading, the HD version would be downsampled on an iPod Video player for playback, and could either the HD or downsample version could playback to a TV – user choice.
Apple has taken their time on whole model, and probably for good reason. Whether technical or otherwise, it is best they take the time required to bring a great and simple solution to the market and nail it, rather than rush the product/service and open a huge crack in the door for M$ to rush in and steal the day…
~Steven
Sum Jung Gai Says: “Who freaking cares whether it’s $9.99 or $29.99? I don’t want to buy my own personal copy of every movie I watch. And until Apple or anybody comes up with a laptop with enough storage to save an entire movie collection, this is just Such a Dumb Idea. I just want to pay a monthly fee like I do on NetFlix to watch all the movies I want.”
Don’t want your “own personal copy”? Well, you’re in the minority of the consuming public there, Gai. Either that, or your’re just a movie company exec (or from Netflix), trolling the forums in a weird effort to bend the masses towards favoring a business model that they’ve already established is ‘niche’.
I will agree that the storage thing is going to be an issue for a lot of people, especially if there’s no option for burning backups (an almost certainty). If that isn’t addressed, and if the studios get their way on pricing, I’ll lay down money now that the worst days of music P2P will look like a picnic once the pirating of movies takes off. The combination of lack of convenience and high pricing will gaurantee it.
“And if I ever do decide to build up my own personal movie collection, it sure as hell won’t be 320×240 copy-limited versions.”
Copy-limited, yes, but I doubt that will be the default size. Most likely these movies will be in Standard Definition format, or just slightly better, with some easy way to down-sample them so the current versions of the video iPod can play them. Maybe with a special iMovie plug-in or something.
This pricing bruhaha sounds like it’ll be quite a battle for Apple in the short-term. On the surface it would seem that if the studios get the upper hand, they would wind up killing the goose before it’s golden, and thus cooler heads will prevail. However, I think these guys know that the real action will happen when HiDef content comes online, and they won’t be doing that until TPMs become a little more ubiquitous (for Apple as well as every other computer maker). Once they have their piracy fears alayed by those little bits of silicon in everyone’s rig, they’ll probably loosen up on pricing, if for no other reason than they may be able to make copies dissappear or what have you & then FORCE you to buy again. Until then I think they may be more than happy to keep the price of admission pretty high, just to recoup whatever piracy losses they think will occur with the current situation, as well as to keep the market of ‘good enough’ definition content from getting to big before the onslaught of HD.
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Not Bill:
I just watched Braveheart for the umteeth time just this past weekend.
There are people who are different than you! Imagine that….
Odyssey67 says: Don’t want your “own personal copy”? Well, you’re in the minority of the consuming public there, Gai.
Gai is in the majority there, Odyssey67. There are far more dvds rented than purchased. Movies are a whole different ball game than music.
Yep, I really do want to watch VHS quality movies on my 15″ laptop screen (or tiny iPod screen) Plus, I’d also love to pay more than $10 for the privilege of doing so, (not forgetting my bandwidth and disk storage costs).
Rrrright.
I have quite a few DVDs already, and they’re pretty good quality. Why would I want to go backwards and watch a movie in crappy quality on a small screen? Or really crappy quality on a big screen? I’m not even going to mention the fact that the content itself is often crappy as well. Ooops, I did, oh well.
Where’s the HD version of the movie? Where’s the XServe-style rack device available so I can plonk it in with the rest of my hi-fi gear? Where’s the laptop with a reasonably sized hard drive (> 250GB) capable of storing many films, as well, as computer related data?
I honestly don’t think that technology is ready for this yet and my guess is Apple is rushing this just to beat the other guys. Early adopter is never truer.
Now, the other issue – convenience is important, but is it really *that* important to trade this for quality? The answer is unfortunately, probably a resounding yes: McDonald’s does a roaring trade on selling poor quality food quickly. There may also be other evidence – how many people really think that watching a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV is somehow robbing you of some of the picture?? (Don’t laugh, many people do think this way, because, ironically, they aren’t thinking about it properly.)
Or maybe this is all just another upgrade scam. Maybe DVDs as we now know them will disappear in the future (at least for first release movies), leaving us with crappy $10+ downloads, or $30 HD/BluRay DVDs? Or maybe just $10+ crappy downloads and $30 HD downloads we have to store ourselves.
The optimist in me hopes that bandwidth and storage will drop so much in the next few years that $10 HD versions will indeed be available for downloading and will be stored on a cheap rack mounted player capable of sending it’s data to any TV in your house. Then again, maybe local storage will disappear entirely, leaving us with a $5 24-hour hire of a movie, available anywhere, anytime. Or better yet, if you’ve got a server at home, why can’t u just stream off of that where ever you go? I hate hotel TV!
quote: “a flat price of $9.99 — an offer the studios flatly rejected. ‘We can’t be put in a position where we lose the ability to price our most popular content higher than less popular stuff,’ :End quote
Ok this not a problem between Steve Jobs and the movie people.
Those who sell movies in theaters all want one price, even if the movie is good or bad. Because they have fixed costs to cover.
Also if a movie is listed at say $3 when it’s normally $6 what does that tell everyone? That’s it’s a bad movie right?
Would you bother even sitting partially through a bad movie and waste $3, plus snacks just to be disappointed?
So that’s why movie houses charge all the same price for movies across the board as not to send a signal to people that a movie sucks.
Another thing people don’t know is this: Sure Apple’s DRM is light now, it’s because the hardware isn’t able to enforce stricter DRM schemes yet. But those schemes are indeed coming and in fact the hardware needed to implement the strict DRM schemes are present in the new Intel based Macs.
Extensible Firmware Interface is a extra firmware level between the OS and the main firmware/hardware. Any calls to hardware are first “verified” through EFI. EFI built drives can go online, download updates, report what it wants before, after and DURING any opertating system running on the machine.
All part of Trusted Computing you can learn more here, our machines will soon not be ours any longer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing
Why buy when you can rent and rip?
The Dude abides
Never Fade, We are different. I rented Braveheart once. It was awesome. A year or so later I got a copy for Christmas. I have never opened it.
If most, or even many, people will watch a movie over and over, the iTunes purchase model may make sense.
Jon: You can buy almost every DVD you want for less than $7 if you know how. (new)
Sounds good — how do you do it?
MW: find Come on Jon, help me find a way!
Nobody is going to be downloading FULL HD 1080i/p quality video any time soon. There is not enough bandwidth and for that matter infrustructure of the net itself to support this. Take an HD-DVD – approximately 30GB of data. I can download 200MB in about 5-7 min. – depending on traffic. Let’s take the best case scenerio of 5min. To download a full HD 30GB file will take 12.5 HOURS. Not. Gonna. Happen.
It will be downgraded and compressed for the forseeable future. It’s going to take fiber to the curb. Period.
Charging more for popular movies is GOUGING. With the exception of bandwidth, which is all on Apple anyway, where is supply and demand? They make the file one time and Apple duplicate’s it (serves the file) and sells thousands of copies. No matter how huge the demand is supply will never be short. So charging more is pure GREED!
And HD, it is a total joke. THis is just another marketing scheme to sell more players and TV’s. Honestly we could go on watching DVD’s as they are now for years and years. Just about everyone has a DVD player by now. Who are they going to sell to? Big companies like Sony know this so they are pushing more technology to suck your wallet dry. Doesn’t matter that old DVD player would run for ten more years, you need to throw it away get a new player, TV and while you are at it re-purchase all your favorite movies in this new format because it really is that much better. What do you know Sony makes money from that too. When there is a new HD DVD player in every home they’ll gather ’round the table and convince you that is no good either. Hopefully this time it will be something better than the tiny baby step from DVD to Blu Ray or HD DVD.