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Day-and-date movies come to iTunes

PRESS RELEASE: May 1, 2008—Apple® today announced that new movie releases from major film studios and premier independent studios are available for purchase on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) on the same day as their DVD release. New releases and catalog titles will be available from 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Lionsgate, Image Entertainment and First Look Studios. Movies purchased from iTunes can be viewed on an iPod® with video, iPhone™, Mac® or PC or on a widescreen TV with Apple TV®, with new releases priced at $14.99 and most catalog titles at $9.99.

“We’re thrilled to bring iTunes Store customers new films for purchase day-and-date with the DVD release,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We think movie fans will love being able to buy their favorites from major and independent studios.”

New releases available for purchase on the iTunes Store this week, concurrent with their DVD release, include “American Gangster” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Other popular titles now available for purchase include “Juno,” “Cloverfield,” “I Am Legend,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”

Pricing & Availability
Movie purchases and rentals from the iTunes Store for Mac or Windows require iTunes 7.6.2, available as a free download immediately from www.itunes.com. iTunes movie purchases and rentals require a valid credit card with a billing address in the country of purchase. iTunes Movies are available in the US only and are $9.99 (US) for library title purchases and $14.99 (US) for new release purchases and $2.99 (US) for library title rentals and $3.99 (US) for new release rentals, and high definition rental versions are priced just one dollar more with library title rentals at $3.99 (US) and new release rentals at $4.99 (US). Short films are available to rent for 99 cents (US). Movies can be previewed, purchased and watched on iPod classic, iPod nano with video, iPod touch, iPhone and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.

Hulu open to the public

A while back you may have heard something about Fox, NBC and other companies getting together to create an online service to provide video content of popular TV shows and movies. Well, it was in beta for months and is now open to the public.

Hulu has a big selection of modern and classic television shows. Everything from The A-Team to Young Hercules. They even have episodes of new shows like Arrested Development, House and Heroes. It’s worth your time to investigate all the offerings.

They’ve also added movies to their list of properties. Boasting more than 50 content providers, including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., and Lionsgate, they’re looking for a huge market share of online video (I wonder if this prospect helped spur on the writer’s strike). Providence Equity Partners even bought in to the the tune of $100-million. Some movies on the list include The Big Lebowski, Mulholland Drive and Live Free or Die Hard.

While the picture is not nearly as good as DVD, and definitely inferior to Blu-ray, the video quality is not too bad, and the interface is user-friendly. I can watch an episode full-screen on my MacBook and it looks acceptable. They are going to be offering high-def content at some point and have HD movie trailers currently so we can look forward to that.

You don’t get Obama Girl on Hulu, but you do get full episodes of your favorite shows. Give it a shot.

Netflix streaming to PS3, Xbox360

This seems too good to be true, but I’m hearing that internet-connected Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox360 consoles will both stream movies directly from Netflix. This amazing feature costs nothing above your existing Netflix subscription fee.

The Xbox360 user will use their existing Xbox LIVE account. “You can choose from over 7,000 movies and TV series, and your choice starts playing on your TELEVISION in as little as 30 seconds.”

The PS3 requires a one-time purchase of a specially-formatted DVD for $3. “Now you can watch movies from Netflix instantly by using your Internet-connected Playstation 3. Simply insert a special Netflix disc into your PS/3 to enable instant movie streaming. The disc is available from Netflix for a one-time fee of $3.”

Source: Seanbajuice

Netflix hopes for Mac delivery

I consider this good news as I use a MacBook for the majority of my personal computing and I use Netflix. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, said they’re planning on bringing “Watch-Instantly” to the Mac platform. Previously it has only been available to PC users through Internet Explorer.

Netflix has been using Microsoft Windows Media digital-rights-managed codecs to protect the content, but Apple uses their own FairPlay DRM which they have not licensed. It’s ridiculous that Apple uses tactics Microsoft has been sued for and nobody bothers (probably because the Mac lifestyle gives Apple a free pass on quite a bit just because it’s “hip”), but I’m not sure why Netflix can’t simply use Open Source Software DRM for cross-platform, cross-browser support.

Regardless, Hastings believes the future of online distribution will grow substantially. He views the Watch-Instantly feature as just the first foray into online distribution.

As a side point, Hastings mentioned that Warner’s support of Blu-ray exclusively should help grow the BD rental business.

War on digital downloads: Day three

In the continuing saga of the Digital Download Crisis, I’ve stumbled across a relevant point made by Tycho of Penny Arcade about the new AppleTV downloads.

Apple’s new digital rental service forces you to watch the download in a 24 hour period. As a strange coincidence, Divx forced the user to watch the film in a 48 hour period. Somehow the format everyone loved to hate 10 years ago is resurrected in digital downloads and praised as the future of home video.

HD downloads aren’t high-def

This is a companion piece to yesterday’s post. I thought this topic was important enough to continue the discussion.

While I more frequently disagree with George Ou of the ZDNet blog, last year he posted on “Why HD movie downloads are a big lie.” I suggest you read the blog as it explains in detail why a 720p video downloaded off Xbox360 or iTunes is no better quality than 480i DVDs.

The main reason this is true is because the 1280×720 picture is compressed to under 1.5GB and has an average bit rate of 1.3 mbps. In comparison, DVDs are 640×480 interlaced compressed to about 6GB with a bit rate closer to 8 mbps. If you believe in science, you can see that DVD video has more detail.

And somehow this is the alternative to Blu-ray? We’re going to go back to VHS quality simply because it’s 50% more convenient? No thank you, sir. Why would you spend so much on the best quality TV you can afford and feed it garbage? It’s like saying 2.5″ low-res screens are the future because they’re on every iPod now. No longer do we have 4:3 screens with 480i resolution, we have 16:9 screens with 320×270 resolution. Yay!

Please don’t give up on high-quality optical media.

Digital downloads don’t threaten optical media

In a strange turn of events, many bloggers are touting iTunes as the killer of Blu-ray Disc. It seems the majority of these people were HD DVD supports in December, and the rest are Steve Jobs. Why the sudden change in tune?

iMovie isn’t anything new, video-on-demand has been around for over a decade. Time Warner was boasting last year about how big their VOD business was and one executive even declared optical media dead. Funny, DVD actually did better than expected last year.

Why are comparisons even being made with Blu-ray Disc anyway? The iTunes movies are not high-def. Some are, but they’re only available to AppleTV Take 2 owners. VOD is in high-def with cable providers. AppleTV is also a rental service. People kept buying VHS and DVD even though Blockbuster was renting movies. Online rentals have been available for a couple years as well. People buy movies to collect them, you don’t collect movies on a hard drive.

Some people point to music to support their case. They saw CD is in a slump. This is true, but some argue that there isn’t music worth buying right now. The fact that music is essentially free online also hurts the music industry, something the movie industry is fighting with all their might.

But why are so many HD DVD fans dropping their support of high-quality movies in 1080p with lossless audio to now support poor-quality video downloads? The best-quality AppleTV only movies are 720p highly-compressed video files with low-bitrate Dolby Digital audio, and most aren’t even in surround sound. Were they not thouroughly impressed with HD DVD’s quality?

What do you think? Will video downloads replace physical media, or will it supplement it?