“Since Apple unveiled its iTunes Music Store in spring 2003, bloggers have batted around the idea that the company chose the name cleverly — because ‘Music’ could be changed easily to ‘Media’ when it started selling online movies. Three years later, although movies have not yet appeared on the iTunes site, it has sold more than 15 million digitized TV shows and videos (for $1.99 a pop), with the blessing of ABC, Disney, Showtime, NBC, MTV, and other providers,” Daniel Turner writes for Technology Review.
“Not surprisingly, then, the success of these online TV shows and videos has accelerated speculation about movies. Last week, Variety, Forbes, and MSNBC all ran stories about rights and pricing negotiations between Apple and the major movie studios. The consensus: It’s just a matter of time before iTunes starts selling feature-length movies, if not this year, then in 2007,” Turner writes.
“For Internet video distributors, though, the Motion Picture Association of America has been a tougher nut to crack than television studios, because the film industry is more concerned about piracy,” Turner writes. “Aside from the wrangling over copyright and digital-rights management, though, technical problems also stand in the way of an iTunes Movie Store. Actually, it’s one key technical issue. While Apple already has a high-profile storefront, marketing mechanism, and suitable file format for delivering movies, figuring out how to deliver these massive, multi-gigabyte files remains a challenge.”
Turner writes, “…Even with H.264 compression, an entire movie would amount to well over one gigabyte and take an entire evening to download at the 1.5-megabits-per-second maximum cable or DSL modem speed available to most Internet users in the United States…”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy” for the heads up.]
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Jedd,
Exactly as I posted above.
Shadowself – “The author of the article is right. Bandwidth is *THE* issue. The average consumer wants his/her stuff *NOW*. S/he will wait a few minutes, but hours? Unlikely.”
—> Agreed. That is unquestionably the root of the issue. PERIOD.
Leo – “But, what the “Annies” aren’t saying is, it takes a very, very long time to build such infrastructure/pipelines. If, as I surmise above, the telcos soon start offering multi-tiered services, then it means the infrastructure/pipelines are already in place. They have already been built and, consequently, paid for. Built the way infrastructure improvements are built and paid for… by the customers (senders and recievers) already using the telcos services“
—> The infrastructure is *NOT* in place, and, as to the bold emphasised part – I must disagree there as well. It is *not* already being paid for by current customers. Venture Capitalists (Wall Street) will be doing the investing looking towards the future. Wall Street will be saying yes or no to broadband expansion. We are currently 16th (approx) in the world in broadband penetration. We currently have 1/50th the bandwidth per capita as Korea. Go to this site:
http://blog.gildertech.com/
Scroll down to Friday, June 9. 2006 – Net Neutrality Laws Create Un-neutral Net. Download the highlighted podcast. It’s about 20 min. long. Listen to it a couple of times (the second half is particularly important). I used to be 100% for net neutrality. After listening to that single podcast, I’ve turned 180˚ and am now absolutely against it. Net neutrality will stifle innovation and become a lawyer fest. It’s already regulated 50 different ways (a different way in each state). TIME TO DEREGULATE. Check out that cast – it’s a no BS hard look at the current state of BB and where we are heading. My thanks goes out to the person who posted a link to this very same podcast in a thread about 3-4 weeks ago – changed my mind entirely.
^^^^ Also check out the .pdf on the same site : Tuesday, June 20. 2006 – We’ll soon have to divert Net traffic through Seoul & Beijing to avoid lawyer spam
Cubert – It’s all about bandwidth. Yes, you could stream and “watch while you buy/dload”, but the hard fact is that there is not enough bandwidth and infrastructure in place yet to handle mass streaming/dloading of quality video at full screen resolutions. It just doesn’t physically exist. BTW, there are a few cool Ken Shamrock UFC clips on YouTube. Just do a search. Hopefully they haven’t been taken down yet.
Sorry….forgot one other thing. George Gilder (the man interviewed in the podcast) is a preeminent expert in this particular field. His comments are not to be taken lightly (IMO).
What the hell, 4 in a row……..
“We’ll soon have to divert Net traffic through Seoul & Beijing to avoid lawyer spam
Intellectuals and politicians mistakenly think of telecom as a perpetual problem: a natural monopoly, an anti-trust peril, a free speech filter, and a forensic circus. Their bright idea of the moment, “net neutrality,”is a concept at once so vague and demanding that its penumbra could be litigated in fifty states and up-and-down the federal court system until all our Internet traffic has to be diverted through Seoul and Beijing merely to avoid lawyer spam. By any name, as Larry Darby points out in an important recent paper, “net neutrality” means price controls on some of the most complex many-sided markets in all industry and thus is sure to do for the rollout of broadband what Sarbox has done for IPOs. (See: http://www.theamericanconsumer.org/Net Neutrality Study.pdf)
There’s the link to the .pdf
“—> The infrastructure is *NOT* in place, and, as to the bold emphasised part – I must disagree there as well. It is *not* already being paid for by current customers. Venture Capitalists (Wall Street) will be doing the investing looking towards the future.”
Let’s see what happens over the next few years. You may be right as I was speculating (I did say “I surmise”), but time will tell.
The reality of the speculation will be dependent on how soon the telcos start offering multi-tiered pricing services. If this happens over the next couple of years or so, along with my speculation that customers may only require a new “interface box” (modem or whatever) and/or a new cable to a telco’s cable at the street, then it means the infrastructure IS in place.
Otherwise we’re probably looking at a decade or so (at the very least) before they can begin widespread (nationwide) offerings of the sort of services we’re talking about.
And, if the infrastructure is already there, it’s already been paid for.
“some people are OK with poorer resolution. Some, like me, are not”
Some people, like, say, people buying millions of videos for $1.99 a pop are OK with poorer resolution. There are millions of people for whom the resolution isn’t enough, there are millions of people for whom the resolution IS enough. Guess which group Apple will cater to? Hint, it’s the ones that are NOT complaining about the quality and are giving Apple (and their partners) money.
“Animation has *signicantly* less infromation content in the imagery than the typical, live action movie.”
Let’s look at this then. Right NOW there is a free episode of “Blade” from Spike TV available for download.
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewVideo?id=162776383&p=161811818&s=143441
IT is one hour 28 minutes long (88 mins). Decent run time for a BAD movie, but how about we double that so that we approach EPIC length. Pretty much the longest movie anyone would download.
It’s 444 megs, double that to 888 megs… still below 1.5 gigs
You can stand by your statement or you can go by the facts. I’m sure you’ll be far more comfortable with your statement though.