“Continuing Hollywood’s dance with Bay Area tech companies, Warner Bros. announced Monday a partnership with online video site Guba.com to distribute new and vintage movies and TV shows,” John Boudreau reports for The San Jose Mercury News.
“The deal is the result of a yearlong courtship started by Guba’s co-founder, 33-year-old Tom McInerney, who expects other studio agreements in coming months. People will be able to rent or buy video downloads on Guba, marking the first time a Web site not affiliated with a Hollywood company can offer both movies and TV shows, from new film releases such as ‘Syriana’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,’ to TV shows, such as ‘Babylon 5’ and ‘The Flintstones,'” Boudreau reports.
“The San Francisco company hopes to grow its catalog of titles every month. Television episodes will be sold starting at $1.79 per episode. Movie rental prices start at $1.99 and films released on the same date they are on DVD will sell for $19.99. Older films will be sold for $9.99,” Boudreau reports. “After initially hesitating, Hollywood has rushed into the digital era and is gaining momentum. Analysts speculate Steve Jobs is working to line up a deal to add movies to Apple Computer’s successful and trend-setting online iTunes music and video store.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If and when Apple launches movies via iTunes with a “true” video iPod, all of these deals will be small potatoes. From various reports, it seems that the pricing mentioned above is close to the pricing with which Hollywood is trying to get Steve Jobs to agree.
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$20 for DVD same day huh?
Are you out of your mind? Oh, wait, yes you are!
Yeah, sign me up for that.
forget buying it in standard res, having a hard copy for backup or whatever, and determining the rip for my pod or computer.
That is irritating!
this is not a good way to treat the market.
Retalitory measures will be taken and we’ll see who can be the biggest asshole and who has the rein on whos nuts.
Ah, Bugs Bunny AND porn from
one convenient location. What
a great setup.
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Did I read that right? $19.95 to buy a downloaded movie? That’s the same price I pay for a real DVD. I could be wrong, but I can’t see how a downloaded movie can compare to an actual DVD in terms of quality and additional features. How can they equate an 8 Gig DVD to a 1Gig download? I doubt anybody would spend the time necessary to download anything over 200 Mb – so there is no way these things are worth $19.95.
Why would I pay the same price for a movie download that I would a DVD? I am happy to pay 99 cents for a song, which is about a song costs on an actual album, because I don’t have to buy the entire album. However, getting a lower quality movie experience for the same price as the DVD minus the extras is nuts. I will accept the lower sound quality from a CD (which I don’t even notice) to be able to download single tracks but that same logic can’t be used for movies. The Hollywood executives really must have their collective heads in the sand. They are trying to dictate what the consumer wants not give the comsumer what they want. Perhaps they should learn about some basic supply and demand curves from economics 101.
Prices are way too high. You can buy older fillms on DVD from 1.99 onwards. So why would I want to pay 9.99 to download?
I suspect some vasaline is included . . . if you know what i mean.
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Not Nuff Said. I do have a large collection of DVDs but not nearly as many as I have rented in my life.
what happened to BitTorrent?
“Rentals are the way to go for the iTunes Movie Store. Why would any one want to pay $20.00 for a movie download with lousy quality, no extra, no packaging? It just doesn’t seem logical. Even $10.00 is a stretch. People buy music and rent movies. Nuff said.
Not Nuff Said. I do have a large collection of DVDs but not nearly as many as I have rented in my life.”
Here here!!!
This is way too strange…guy makes deal to sell for $1.79 a pop a lot of the same TV shows he has been selling for years as posted on usenet. Will the Giant Usenet Binary Archive no longer archive usenet binaries?
Add to this that GUBA is already the largest source of downloadable porn around, although he went and segregated that into a separate storefront.
Just really, really odd. Get your legal Hollywood blockbusters, bootleg TV shows, and interracial double penetration videos all from the same place…
OpJ
That sounds like a bang for your buck . . . .
9.99 for new dvds.
2.99 for older ones.
I’m not interested in purchasing movies, but I do like the idea of a $1.99 rental.
I hope iTunes incorporates a rental plan of some sort.
I had assumed that this would be a Windows only format of soome sort.
I was plesantly surprised to see that I could purchase movies in several formats, including QuickTime, and including encoded for the iPod.
I can purchase 2001, The Matrix, and other films I like.
It doesn’t seem like such a bad service to me.
19.99 is not a good idea for buying movies online… but 1.99 for rentals might work out.
Guba was virtually unknown for years, then made some splash by offering on-the-fly conversions of usenet binary posts into first PSP and then iPod video formats.
The guy that owns Guba is a former Apple employee and probably would crawl up Apple’s ass in a second if he could. (Actually, that sounds kinda like a video that someone might download from the before-today GUBA…….)
I was wondering what was behind GUBA substantially decreasing the range of usenet groups it carried–I used it a lot last year when it had the star trek and galactica binary newsgroups (and I think buffy, farscape etc.., much more convenient that ripping the DVDs and then running them through isquint), but then the show-specific groups disappeared one day. Must have been hard to argue that GUBA isn’t directly selling illegal material when it makes available a group called “alt.binaries,galactica” or somesuch…