Saturday, December 3, 2005 |
17:05 - Details emerge
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0511contentdist.html
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This is gonna be one hotly anticipated Macworld. Further to last week's speculation, here's the latest from Think Secret:
Apple is planning to unveil a robust new content distribution system in January at Macworld Expo alongside its revamped media-savvy Mac mini, Think Secret has learned. The new content system and related media deals, which will include feature-length content, expanded television offerings, and more, will further cement Apple's increasing lead in digital media delivery.
In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology -- for which Apple previously received a patent -- will serve it to the user's computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer's hard drive.
This method, which will be every bit as simple and straightforward for consumers as the iTunes Music Store is now, poses a number of advantages over Apple's current pay-once-download-once system, including saving users' hard drive space and essentially providing a secure back-up of everything purchased.
Interesting. That does answer one question that had been nagging at me—namely, how many feature-length movies do they expect people to be able to store on their hard drives, especially if it's a) just a Mac mini, and b) if they're also using that same drive to store iTunes music, iPhoto content, video files, and all their DVR recordings.
But it does also make one wonder about viewer habit tracking; if they have to stream the content to you upon demand, even if it's pay-once rather than pay-per-view, they won't be able to claim unequivocally that they're not watching what we're watching.
Maybe that'll be a necessary evil for this content delivery system to work. Again, after all, there'll be definite logistical benefits. But it certainly underscores the fact that online movie purchasing doesn't follow the same rules and dynamics as online music purchasing does—hence my longtime skepticism of movie downloads fitting as easily into the iTunes metaphor as many others thought it would.
We'll see. It sure sounds like they've got a lot planned.
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