g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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.clue
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Cartago Delenda Est




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Sunday, September 24, 2006
17:55 - The next stage

(top) link
You know what iTunes movies need?

Subtitles.

And DVD-player-type controls.

And alternate audio tracks.

And special features.

Yeah—everything DVDs have, except for, you know, the DVDs.

But I'd settle for subtitles to start out with. It'd hardly even take up any extra space or download time, and I'm sure they could be muxed into the video stream, or packaged in a bundle format that wouldn't be compatible with Windows.

But if they could do that, then they could do lyrics in songs, right?

C'mon, Apple. You've laid the groundwork for a new digital medium to replace the physical formats for audio and video. It has the potential to be everything the physical media are and more. So now it's time to make that happen, what what?

UPDATE: Sam M. writes:

That'll be iTunes 8. First, give it a year or so for the studios to notice that this model makes oodles of money for them, and to realize that the type of people who want commentaries and special features are the type of people who would replace their DVD player with an 802.11n set-top box streaming content from their computers anyway. Then they'll offer regular one-disc DVDs with no special features for the Christmas With The Kranks for 19 bucks from Walmart audience, and all that commentary jazz and special features will be a $1.99-$4.99 extra on iTunes, and for the really hardcore fan, there's the 4-disc HD/Blu-Ray Ultra Special Edition with 87 hours of bonus material and collectible pewter figurines of the main characters.

Another prediction is that once their catalog gets big enough and iTVs are enough living rooms, iTunes will introduce a rental option for about four or five bucks, with the option to pay the full 15 if you like the movie and want to keep it. Otherwise the DRM will make the movie unplayable and delete it. Kinda what DivX tried back in the day.

That's what Steve has been spending this whole time telling the world he refuses to do with music... everyone else has a rental model where the DRM expires the music unless you refresh it every month, and Steve keeps saying people would rather own their media. And there are already movie download sites like Vongo.com that operate on a rental model, just like the Napsters of the world.

That said, movies are a bit of a different animal. People rent movies all the time, from video stores; there hasn't been any analogous "music rental" system in place for people to get used to, so iTunes' download-to-own model has always made more sense to people than renting. But with videos it might well be a different story. Just yesterday I was browsing the catalog and thinking, "You know, I wouldn't mind renting these movies so I can watch them once—but I'm not sure I'd want to buy them, for $10-$15, especially sight unseen."

(The biggest issue for me being disk space rather than price, actually. And that's another area in which movies differ pretty significantly from music. 1GB represents a lot more hardware to budget for than 3MB.)

I bought Grosse Pointe Blank and enjoyed its playback experience and flexibility immensely; but do I want to watch it again? Not for a while, certainly. That's way different from music, where I might well want to listen to the same song several times a day. So now I've got a big lump taking up a gigabyte of my disk and my backup system, pretty much uselessly. If I'd rented the movie, I'd just delete it. But now I can't, or else I wasted my $15.

Imagine if I didn't like the movie.

So frankly I really like the idea of the rental option for movies. I can see devouring my way through the entire library if that were available. Music, not so much. But with a library of (say) 100 movies, they stand to make $500 on rentals from me where they might only get $15 or $30 on outright purchases. I just hope they can keep the story straight, and don't have to feel like they're compromising their position or going back on their philosophy. If they make the case sufficiently that movies are a very different thing from music and follow different rules, they could make it stick.


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© Brian Tiemann