| Wednesday, November 9, 2005 |
23:23 - Silence! The Steve speaks!
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=13098
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Lots of interesting tidbits from Steve on the future of movie downloads, in an analyst conference for Pixar:
Apple-watchers may be interested in some of Jobs' comments as regards iTunes and film piracy.
"The biggest problem with downloading feature-length films through iTunes is bandwidth, it takes too long in US," he explained.
And presumably in Europe, where there's a lot more broadband, there are regulatory issues to deal with. (Besides, even Steve probably couldn't bring himself to debut a new feature only in France.)
He confirmed his belief that illegal digital sharing of movies is taking place, but stressed: "There is some evidence that shows people downloading movies illegally wouldn't have bought them anyway."
Jobs believes the best strategy to deal with such problems is to create better legal alternatives to help keep honest consumers honest, and prevent them getting into the habit of stealing: "Hollywood has some time to put in place legal alternatives," he said.
So the idea is to make sure kids don't get into the habit of stealing in the first place—if they grow up knowing of a good, reliable, convenient, legal method for getting the movies they want, they'll opt for it if they have even a slight bit of desire to remain above-board. Steve knows that once a person starts stealing, he probably won't stop, because there's always that psychological precedent in his mind; he's always done it before, so why stop now? iTunes has already shown that it's possible to combat that pernicious tendency by simply making it worth people's while to be legal. Now it's movies' turn—as soon as the infrastructure is here.
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Brian Tiemann
