“It’s been about two months since Apple’s September 12 ‘Showtime’ event introduced feature-length movies to the iTunes Store. And, as of this writing anyhow, while the number of movies offered through iTunes has grown thanks to weekly new releases, the number of studios participating in the service has not. It’s still the same four studios that were there from the get-go—Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Touchstone, and Miramax (which are all owned by Apple’s old pal, Disney, for those of you scoring at home),” Philip Michaels writes for Macworld.
Michaels writes, “To paraphrase that old cliché from one of the westerns you’ll undoubtedly find among the iTunes Store’s Library selections, it’s quiet out there… too quiet. In the motion pictures, that line usually gets uttered before all manner of havoc is unleashed. Which means it’s probably about time for Apple to add some more movie studios to the iTunes mix.”
Full article here.
Related articles:
Disney sells nearly 500,000 movies via Apple’s iTunes Store in less than two months – November 09, 2006
Fox movies, including ‘Star Wars’ franchise, coming soon to Apple’s iTunes Store? – November 08, 2006
Analyst: two major studios seen joining Apple’s iTunes Store – October 10, 2006
Report: Apple and Wal-Mart in discussions over iTunes Store alliance – September 29, 2006
Disney’s remarkable 1st week iTunes movies sales should have studios clambering aboard Apple train – September 20, 2006
Disney sells 125,000 movie downloads via Apple’s iTunes Store in first week – September 19, 2006
Apple debuts iTunes 7 – September 12, 2006
I think others have said that nothing will happen ’til after the holiday season, so that WalMart can sell it’s wharehouse of DVD’s. After that, things should open up somewhat.
It’s not the best system yet.. as we all sprint to HD, Apple needs to find a way to send out HD content. Period. I love the idea of getting new music with no container from the iTunes store, mainly because the encoded AAC files, while not perfect, are plenty good enough for me to listen to.
iTunes movies, while not bad, are not HD yet. So while I would also love to purchase movies with no containers… it has to be as good as what I get in HD from HBO, Showtime, and others in my area…
(Magic Word “fear”
If movies are not offered in HD soon, I fear Apple may have made a misstep with feature-length films on iTunes.
I agree. Next year will show the rise of the movie downloads. Holiday sales will go up, but only because gift certificates will flow.
I think HD movies will show up, or some newish codec that keeps downloads smallish, but with higher definition.
movie downloads… meh. Rarely do I want to own a movie… “V for Vendetta” being a recent exception. Buying it at a brick and mortar store, I have excelllent quality, and an automatic backup disc.. iTunes can’t touch that, and I don’t see it being able to anytime soon. Movies for rent via iTunes, yes, but w/ decent quality and no hassle & minimal restrictions. I think HD will be ‘bleeding edge’ for a couple of more years, love my cheap flat screen CRT.
I’m really surprised that some of the independant (Sundance type) studios haven’t inked deals with iTunes yet… Especially with the current limited catalog, you’d think the indies would be jumping all over the chance to take part in the distribution channel that iTunes offers.. It’d put their films in front of tons of people who wouldn’t otherwise see them.
If movies are not offered in HD soon, I fear Apple may have made a misstep with feature-length films on iTunes.
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At this point, I think rentals are more important than HD.. So few people actually even have HD tvs. Of course HD would be optimal, but I think just stepping up the
“near Dvd quality” to “actual DVD quality” will be sufficient for most folks…
Now where are those damn rentals on iTunes.. Appx. 30 million movies are rented each day in the US, as opposed to only 3 million are sold.. Apple you need to RENT the movies too!
R, I don’t think you can add a codec that does better compression than h264. 264 is already very CPUhungry and you usually replace filesize with CPUpower required to decode it. Compress files further and most computers won’t be able to decompress the movies in realtime.
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If only the US wasn’t a third world country when it comes to broadband this wouldn’t be a problem. Here in Sweden you can get 100Mbit full duplex for about us$30/month. 1Gbit is available to some in bigger cities for about us$100/month but I don’t think it’s worth it yet
Wasn’t Steve’s “Year of HD” like… Two years ago?!?!
What’s up Apple?
WHY DON’T THEY OPEN FOR CANADA?
sorry for shouting. I am sick of this. AAPL is becoming slow……
AAPL should act faster or else others will catch up. specially when they provide almost the same…
TheConfuzed1:
I am TheConfuzed2!!!!
WAAH, WAAH, WAAAAHHAHAAAAHHHHHH . . .
Stop the freakin’ whining.
Apple’s doing what they can. It’s not their fault that the broadband pipe here in the states is lacking comparatively. And Sweden?!?!?!? So what, Emil? You try and wire up a country the size of the Untied States while dealing with all the different logistics and individual state governments and every other hurdle. Hell, if the U.S. was the size of Sweden, WE’D have 100Mbit too.
Stop being a bunch of nancies and suck it up. Sure, right now most people are gonna keep going to Schlockbuster or Movie Gallery or Hollyweird Video or whatever the hell else is out there, but remember: Baby Steps, people. Baby steps. The power of iTunes is shocking. “The Office” on NBC is probably only still on NBC because of its popularity … ON iTUNES!!!!! Who woulda thought that the day after Apple announced TV shows were being offered in the iTunes Store?
Within five years, the brick-and-mortar DVD rental stores will either have to have adapted to the new paradigm or they’ll be gone. Or else they’ll get bought up before then. No way by the year 2011 am I going to be schlepping my ass out in the middle of winter to drive 15 minutes to Suncoast to rent the latest Jim Carrey crapfest when all I’ll have to do is fire up Front Row or whatever the hell it’ll be called by then and watch it from my flash-based 1 terabyte iTV memory box. No way.
So chill out, girls.
Simple: The Movie Studios are not hurting as bad as the Record Labels are
They can afford to wait.
But they can’t deny it was Apple that got the whole ball rolling.
What pissed me off was the bloat in iTunes 7 and the increase in content file size, so now I’m cutting back my iTMS purchases.
Only LOST and Prison Break, the rest can go to hell.
I’ll Netflix the DVD when it appears and buy/rip it if it’s something I wanna keep on a iPod.
One can achieve large bandwidth optical data tranmissions using Kerr nonlinearity doped one-dimensional coupled cavity optical waveguides. When the intensity is increased, the Kerr effects change the refractive index of the Kerr cavity, which results in a large decrease of transmission coefficients in the whole band. Combine this feature with a free-space optical interconnections, wavelength division multiplexing, optical random access memory, code-division multiple-access conduits, acousto-optic tunable filters, Bulk Synchronous Parallelism, and wavelength division multiplexing flux capacitors you can pump data down the pipe at over 250 gigabits per second
Meaning enjoying films with HD in real time. Cool, huh? I bet Jobs has got something like this already installed at home
Allen: waaaahhhhhhhh Most of us don’t have HDTV screens yet, and most of us definitely don’t have HDTV hard drives (1 standard DVD = 720 MB, 1 HiDef DVD = 25-30 GB). I’ve got 1 500 GB HD. Word on the street says I can up that to 750 GB. So on a 750 GB drive I can hold 1,000 standard-res movies and 25-30 HiDef movies. Arguments of bandwidth aside, it just makes no sense for Apple to sell HiDef content AT THE CURRENT TIME. It will happen, but only when computers start shipping with hard drives measured in the multi-terabyte range and everyone has good back-up system (aka TimeMachine). It’ll happen no sooner than fall 2007, more likely fall 2008.
And has Disney put Song of the South on iTunes yet?
Tommy boy, re-read my post and eat some crow. I said At this point, I think rentals are more important than HD.. So few people actually even have HD tvs.
And BTW, Microsoft is offering HD rentals and there are already affordable consumer ISP services fast enough for HD content. Earthlink offers a bundle with VOIP and 8.0 Mbps DSL (5x faster than standard DSL) for $69.95 a month, there are many other similar offers from competitors.
http://www.earthlink.net/voice/bundles/dslhomephone/
What I want:
I want HD ownership that I DONT have to store locally. I want Apple to record on their Cupertino computers and in their DRM that I OWN (not rent) a few dozen HD movies and TV shows. This would be held in my .Mac account on their servers. The movies themselves would reside once only on THEIR computers, not mine. Then each time I wanted to watch a movie it downloads it to my Mac/iTV in pieces (via BitTorrent, Akamai or other).
This way I could go to a friend’s house and log in to my .Mac account on his iTV and watch my movies there via his internet download.
I could choose to cache it locally for storage on my Mac/iPod for portable & offline viewing. This way my storage requirements are only about 30 GB total, however many HD movies I own.
Good point about the compression, but didn’t Macsimumnews just post another Apple patent for something like that not too long ago? Maybe I’m not remembering correctly…
Emil wrote: “If only the US wasn’t a third world country when it comes to broadband this wouldn’t be a problem.”
Emil, if you think that the Government can magically deliver a country beyond where one would get by an efficient market, keep dreaming. I would rather have our “third world country” than your tax/social burdens.
Your $30 mega-broadband is not a bargain. Take a look around, you are paying for that and many other “social necessities” up the wazoo (technical term). Your government has you fooled!