apple news/media reports
09/06/2006, 10:45am, EDT
Wednesday, September 6th
Apple, Amazon to sell movies online
Both Amazon and Apple are expected to unveil new movie-downloading services in the coming weeks with online movie offerings from both services expected for sale at the same time as DVD versions of movies are released. According to The WSJ, Amazon has all the major Hollywood studios except Walt Disney Co. lined up to offer movies on its service, while Apple's iTunes has just one major studio, Disney, due to wrangling over pricing for movies. Called "Amazon Unbox," the internet retailer is expected to sell the bulk of its movies between $10 and $15; however, there could be a larger range along with the option to "rent" movies. Apple, however, has struggled to sign up studios: "Apple, meanwhile, plans to sell movies for just a handful of different prices, starting at $9.99 for catalog titles and going up to $14.99 for new releases.... Apple has been unable to sign up all of the studios in large part because they can't agree on price. Many studios want more than the $14.50 or so Apple is offering to studios as a wholesale price per movie so they can create similar or bigger margins than they get with physical DVDs."
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my .02
Argh! None of them get it! "We only wanna do this if we're gonna make craploads more money."
No! Look, ask the record companies who sell music and the networks who sell TV shows on iTMS. Do they make a lot of money per unit? No! But it costs almost nothing (or perhaps actually nothing) to provide their wares for sale on iTMS. In return, they get more people using their product, legally. More eyeballs. more mindshare. and they're "in" on something cool.
Listen carefully, studio idiots: There is currently NO WAY to make craploads of money in the movie download business. (Nor will there be, unless we suddenly run out of the materials to make DVDs with, and they start costing $50 each.) But the landscape is changing, and it's essential to get in now -- you won't make much, but it won't cost you much. Just sign on already.
The costs are cheaper than DVD for the studios, so there's really no reason to expect the same wholesale figures. They only have to produce the encoded version and upload it to Apple. That can't be more work than making the master file of a DVD burn. Then there's no product to press, print, ship, etc. There's also no time-lag. The moment they release it, people can buy it. There's no need to wait for it to get to the person's market, or to be out of stock. Just constant, immediate sales flow.
Hey, Hollywood, WAKE UP. YOU'RE KILLING YOURSELVES!
I would want to sacrifice my bandwidth for some other stuff most of the time where it's used for phone, skype, video... etc.
DVD kiosks are available for $1 a night per new movie only (redbox.com) with all the DVD features and stuff. The best thing is that there are always free rental codes from the web for free movies... downloading doesn't seem to attract me anymore... just my 2c.