Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Apple iMovieTunes
Have you heard the latest rumor about Apple offering full length movies for download by the end of the year. The rumored price would be $9.99 per movie. Of course since this is still a vague rumor, there are few details about the service. The prices could change and what DRM and rights as a consumer do you have. Does Apple require that you have some iPod equivalent for the TV? But this story does seem to have some traction and is being followed by many news services.
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6 comments:
The interesting part for me, Stitch, is the price point. I'm sure you heard that the movie industry won't settle for a fixed price like the music business. That may or may not make sense because the movie industry is definitely different!
However, I heard the movie industry may want to charge up to $20 for recent releases for a download. I think that's high given that the resolution will not be as good as on DVD (at least I assume). I really hope that the price is commensurate with a media that is lower quality than the DVD. That's the only way it would make sense. However, the $20 I heard is just on the web, which may or may not be true.
What really excites me is the possibility of a whole new iPod with new movie playing capability.
Gents,
Yes, it is interesting, but I agree that the resolution must be less than a DVD, and therefore makes buying movies from iTunes less enticing. I agree with Jobs that they must make it cheaper for downloaded movies - no more than $9.99. Then, I think it will be a neat service.
-Le
I wouldn't assume that the downloads would be worse than a DVD. A current DVD has a resolution of 720x480 compared with regular TV which only has 480 lines ( don't know how wide though ). Quicktime's H.264 format has a resolution of up to 1920x1080 which is the highest definition of HDTV. So having DVD quality may not be too difficult and still have reasonable download times. They could even use HD which I believe Blue Ray disks will have but this may be too much data at this time. I heard that NetFlix is also looking into this same technology but from a rental basis. You would have to buy a box for your TV to use this.
Good info, Stitch. I wasn't thinking about it from a Quicktime capability standpoint - I was thinking about it from a download standpoint. Downloading a movie will be very intensive, due to it's length, and to put it at higher resolutions would make it even more taxing. I don't know if internet networks are up for that yet.
-Le
Check out the link below for data rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
For DVD quality at 30fps (TV is 24fps) it takes 10Mbit/s to stream this quality. Cable modems currently have download speeds of 27Mbit/s. So theoretically it would be possible to stream DVD quality if you computer could keep up with conversion. But the idea of downloading a movie does not have to happen in real time. So even if it takes double real time to download then a 2hr movie could download overnight. This is quicker than Netflix. It takes them about 4-5days to get you a movie. Just some food for thought.
One last point is that a satellite dish downloads HD content right now using a satellite and is able to play it in real time. Apple may not be thinking the internet for the download conduit. Maybe they are also inking deals with dish providers.
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