Fox to offer TV shows, movies

$5 max for a movie online. A DVD quality movie in MPEG-4 will run at about 1GB. Maybe a little more. With AAC 5.1 sound you're looking at more like 1.5GB for a 100 minute feature film. Since most people's broadband connections have bandwidth limits, this size makes DVD quality impractical and expensive. So you have to reduce the size significantly. And therefore why would someone want to pay DVD price for a quarter of the pixels?

If you want DVD's on your computer then there are many great ways to get them there like using MacTheRipper or Handbrake. You can even keep the 5.1 surround sound if you're willing to do a little work and demux the ac-3 soundtrack into 6 aiff files, build your own quicktime soundtrack with all 6 in it and export it as AAC 5.1. It's about 5 minutes of work and worth it if you're got a digital audio out on your mac.

Pay $20 for a fraction of the quality just to save an hour or two of computer processing and about 5-10 minutes of actual work? I don't think so.

No way would I pay $20 to download a movie when I can get a DVD for that or less and get much more. 5.1 sound, extras galore, and a real disc.

This is very typical of what small-minded executives with their own agendas, at various studios, are brewing. This has nothing to do wit providing a consumer-friendly product, or even a better revenue stream for the originating studio, but everything with some guy wanting to path themselves on the back.

In most cases, it's some tech head that has a tech-blind exec's ear, who sells him on the idea of "We don't need the Apple iTunes store, we can do it better", and who gets greenlit because of ignorance. This happens all of the time, and will most likely happen some more in the future.

All it means, is that the respective studio will be losing millions of dollars in the process of implementation, marketing and non-sales, and will still end up with their content on iTunes when Apple is ready... and the originators of this kind of million dollar boondongle will just get a promotion, as their project is put to rest...

Must be nice wasting other people's money, eh?

For iTunes quality people will pay $10, i won't pay it but i don't pay $1 a song either. $10 is the magic figure and Steve knows it.

For iTunes quality people will pay $10, i won't pay it but i don't pay $1 a song either. $10 is the magic figure and Steve knows it.

I wouldn't pay $10 for itunes quality. iTunes quality blows big time on a large screen. Trying to follow the crowd, I plugged my core duo mini into my 65" HDTV via DVI, and watched one of the free pilot downloads from iTMS. The artifacts and quality was alarmingly poor. Fine enough, probably, on a 20" monitor or if you just don't care. I can't see myself paying $1.99 for any video content on iTMS with that quality (hell, if you were desparate enough that I missed an episode, go dig up a bottorrent client and find an HDTV version of said show - oh, right, that's illegal, but selling crap for $2 isn't?).