We’ve been waiting for this for a year. Maybe two.

When will the movies show up on iTMS and what’s big frackin’ hold up? The next gen of iPods is also later than expected, though it doesn’t look as though there’s much competition on the horizon if the Toshiba-built Microsoft Zune brick is any indication.

I have a two-year old iPod Photo which works great but doesn’t do movies, and I don’t want a first generation iPod with Video.

Steve!! I have money in my pocket!! Take it!!

Utz to waitress: When do I get my potato wedges, honey? I ordered them half an hour ago.
Waitress to Utz: When they are ready, sweetheart.

Apple needs to be ready with a bunch of products when dinner time comes around. When the order is placed doesn’t matter.

It’s freakin’ dinner time in a couple months.

What I’m lookin’ for on the menu:

1 - faster MacBook
2 - faster MacBook Pro
3 - faster iMac
4 - new iPod with bigger screen
5 - Tera’s iPad w/wireless and camera built in
6 - movies at the iTunes Music Store

7 - and for dessert, I Want My iPhone™

I have the sneaking suspicion that coming soon (within 6 months) an iTunes Movie Store and a deal with some high playing movie studios. I think the only sticking point is price right at this moment.

There’s an interesting set of aspects to this “movies” on iTunes Music Store issue that we haven’t talked much about.

Critical mass and timing and bandwidth.

For movies to be successful, there needs to be plenty of devices to play them with the same degree of satisfaction that iTunes plays music on both Mac and Windows.

Playing TV shows in iTunes is cumbersome at best. It’s not a pleasant experience. Worse, I don’t see many of us spending hours on movies using an iPod with video.

Enter Front Row. Still not ready for primetime but the experience is better, especially on the Intel Macs. I suspect Apple would like a few million more Intel Macs on the streets before launching the “Cool Factor” of movies on iTMS so people will want to upgrade.

Bandwidth? Big problem. It takes forever to download movies, only about 2/3 of the US is high speed, blah blah…

There’s also the price tag. I like $1.99 for TV shows, so what’s a full feature length movie going to cost us? It’s gotta be no more than $9.99 or I’m sticking with DVDs.

With Christmas not that far away, it is time that Apple released a few ‘toys’, fun stuff that will appeal to the Christmas market.

I must question the desire among the marketplace to watch movies on a 3” or 4” screen. I watch kids out and about, and mostly its their cell phones and Nintendo DS’s. (I see few of the Sony PSP; I wonder how sucessful that is.) Mostly, at that small screen size, it’s all about interactive entertainment, not passive entertainment. It’s about short burst of activity, because they’re on the move.

I agree that the bandwidth isn’t there for downloading. However, I also read something, not long ago, about Apple looking at a subscription model for the movies (of a sort), that none of the studios wanted to sell movies outright on iTunes. You get so many viewings--2 or 3--and that’s it, expiration.

All in all, I suspect that there’s little to profit from a Movie store, not for Apple or anyone. How many times will you listen to a piece of music before you tire of it? How many times will you watch a movie? What is better value, that 99 cent song, or that $5 movie?

Remember, a lot of people buy DVDs not because they watch them endlessly, but because they’re building a library, and it says something about them, which movies sit on the shelf. (Same as books.) If a product is too virtual, it is invisible.

Tom Coppinger - 30 August 2006 11:54 AM

Remember, a lot of people buy DVDs not because they watch them endlessly, but because they’re building a library, and it says something about them, which movies sit on the shelf. (Same as books.) If a product is too virtual, it is invisible.

That says something very important.

We collect things. I have about 3,500 songs on my iPod, about 65-percent of them are from CDs and the remainder from iTMS.

Notable, is that of all those songs only a few hundred have been played more than 10 times. Only a few hundred more have been played between 5 and 10 times.

We collect things. I suspect we’ll collect movies, too. I’ve already got 50 music videos, and a few dozen TV shows.

I just haven’t sprung for an iPod to play them. Yet.

Linking to a Businessweek article from MacSurfer, they report that the proposed Apple prices for movies are now $14.99 for new releases, and $9.99 for older movies.

I sincerely hope that’s not true. The new release price can almost be matched by on-line merchants such as CD-WOW. And the older movies are selling for less than $10 at many retail venues.

Considering the inconvenience of a long download, and getting no case or cover to boot, $8.99 seems a far better price for a new release. Older movies, heck, I’d sell them for $3.99.

It’s a case of Hollywood getting too greedy. We’ll find out in September sometime.

I’m ready!! Steve, can you hear me? My credit card balance is low and my desire is high!!

Show me the goods and I’ll show you the money!

I’d rather have the dvd in my hand then download a movie off the net, most Dvds are like $9.99 anywayz.

Txun - 30 September 2006 09:57 AM

I’d rather have the dvd in my hand then download a movie off the net, most Dvds are like $9.99 anywayz.

The problem with that, and why digital storage of movies and TV shows is so compelling is the iPod. I can transfer video from my iTunes to my iPod and watch AND listen to something worthwhile during the morning and afternoon commute.

That’s tougher to do with a physical DVD, unless you’re using handbrake to rip it to iTunes, and that’s illegal, and takes forever anyway.

Apple’s trying to sell us stuff, not make it easy to take our existing media DVDs and have ‘em work with iPod.

I bought a couple of movies from the iTunes store yesterday. The download was rather painless and uneventful and the movies look great on the Mac. The only thing missing is the ability to stream said movies from Mac to Mac or to the TV in the family room.

We assume that’s what iTV is for so now our shopping for other solutions is on hold while Steve and Company do the product intro Vaporware Dance.

Sigh. I’ll wait.

Since I just bit the bullet and ordered a new black 80GB iPod, I sorta kinda hope nothing new comes out in that realm for a while, if you know what I mean.

Hal