Apple may not be able to revolutionize Hollywood

There's no video piracy problem? Hollywood is not livid about people sharing movies and TV shows on P2P networks? It used to be that New York Times journalists researched their stories...

Netflix is the new Napster. The Netflix subscribers I know copy the movies they like and share them with their friends.

I'm glad to hear that half the internet's bandwidth being used to pirate videos via bit torrent isn't a problem for anybody. Those anti-movie-piracy announcements they show before films must be the work of rogue Hollywood operatives.

I hate how they call this a video iPod. It's not a video iPod, a vPod, or an iPod video, IT'S AN iPOD!!! It's thinner, better looking, has a bigger drive at the low end, and has better battery life than the old one. It just happens to play video. Apple is just testing the waters. They don't stand much to lose with this. They'll still sell millions cause it's the replacement for the old iPod. Many thousand of those people will download a tv episode or music video. Why don't they start ragging on Dell, Creative, and all those poser fake iPod making hack companies for not having the feature instead of scrutinizing the iPod for having a FREE EXTRA.

Piracy or not, the real story here is if you miss a show, you don't have to wait till the end of the season and pay $40 to see it. You can get it now, and for only a couple of bucks. That WILL revolutionize hollywood.

The real obstacle is bandwidth. Not until the current broadband pipes get much fatter are we going to see widespread adoption of video downloading. The content and DRM part is easy. The bandwidth will be a greater challenge. If it takes 20 mins to download Lost in 320x240, then certainly it's going to take much longer to download an HD version. Until the pipes are fatter, people arent going to want to wait hours for a download.

Piracy or not, the real story here is if you miss a show, you don't have to wait till the end of the season and pay $40 to see it. You can get it now, and for only a couple of bucks. That WILL revolutionize hollywood.

Ummm, you don't have to wait until the end of the season and pay $40 o see it. Hell, some shows rerun so often its hillarious (you missed an episode of Lost? No problem, check it out again Saturday night on ABC).

This wasn't a huge investment into an untested business model on anybody's part. They haggled a bit, negotiated a deal how to divide the $1.99 and put the shows on the servers. With the enormous power of Apple/iTunes brand with the public, people will just buy into this PR and start downloading $2 shows. It's cheaper than a slice of pizza (which is currently about $3.25 here in New York)!! iTunes has millions of registered customers in the US. Even with a small percentage of those buying shows (and they don't need the new iPod video to watch them), it will take off. I could easilly see half of my female office colleagues buying 'Desperate Housewives' and watching it during their lunch breaks on their office computers. This simply cannot fail. And once it succeeds, WB/Universal/Fox/NBC/CBS and all other studios and networks will be approaching Steve. And regarding Archos/Creative/Samsung and all others, it will come down to ultimate convenience - surf -> click -> download -> watch (4 simple steps). In music downloads, nobody beats iTunes yet. It will therefore be the same for videos.