iTunes Icon Evolution – from 1.0 to 10.0. Desinformado
Nice overview of the feature changes along with the icon changes.
The New York Times published an article today, Networks Wary of Apple’s Push to Cut Show Prices. It includes some more quotes from generally unnamed network execs, but doesn’t address the problem I did the other day of how DVDs and Blu-ray are undercutting the iTunes pricing model with accelerating frequency.
The article makes mention of the fact that viewers can choose to watch television shows for free on Hulu, but doesn’t mention that Hulu is still a money-losing venture, or the rumors that it will be subscription-based on the iPad.
Meanwhile, Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes a piece today that graphs the growth of movies and television shows on iTunes, and breaks down the relatively slow growth of both media from statements Apple has made in financial conference calls. In a nutshell, compared to the rate that iTunes sells music, movie and television sales are practically non-starters (although it is worth noting that when Apple bundles rentals and sales together, the numbers jump a lot. Apparently, the iTunes rental model is more popular than sales.)
Also, don’t forget about Apple’s 500,000 square foot data center that is due to come online in 2010. I haven’t been able to find an exact date, but don’t forget that’s five times bigger than their existing data center in California (this is apparently a video from a North Carolina realtor taken on Feb. 19):
Obviously, the construction has been going at a very fast pace from its announced construction just last summer. My opinion? That the target of that Data Center is Netflix streaming.
References:
Networks Wary of Apple’s Push to Cut Show Prices – New York Times, February 21, 2010
Apple’s new pitch to Hollywood – Apple 2.0 (Fortune), February 22, 2010
Apple Data Center Maiden NC – YouTube
Interview: Apple’s Gigantic New Data Center Hints at Cloud Computing - Cult of Mac, August 16, 2009
Feb 192010
Warner Music’s CEO recently admitted that the variable pricing the record labels fought so long and hard for with Apple over the past few years wasn’t a rousing success. In fact, he admitted that “maybe raising prices in a recession wasn’t the best idea.” Whether it’s Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC who removed his shows from iTunes in favor of Hulu because he wanted to both charge more and lump shows into bundles (essentially using marketing and selling strategies from the last century), or Warner’s Bronfman, it seems like the CEO’s of these companies are incompetent morons who have no idea what they’re doing. And I’m not even talking about the whole Leno/Conan O’Brien debacle.
From recent news, it seems like the book and magazine publishers are the newest content industries that aren’t listening to Apple when it comes to pricing and distribution, with potentially overpriced books, magazine, and newspaper subscriptions threatening to limit the possible success of the new iPad distribution model. We’ll have to see how this turns out; what I really wanted to mention today was the pricing of TV shows on iTunes.
In the past couple of days the rumor has appeared that CBS would be amongst the first to offer $.99 television shows; the rumors aren’t clear if this would be some or all of their content, and if so, what. I am presuming that this would be $.99 standard definition and $1.99 high definition. I really hope this is the case, as my recent research into this shows quite a disparity in pricing and iTunes overall guilty of charging quite a premium, particularly for HD content.
Blu-ray discs and players have, up until the last holiday season, been prohibitively expensive for most consumers. This high price wasn’t the “bag of hurt” that Steve Jobs so famously referred to a few years ago; he was referencing the expensive and complex licensing of the technology for playback and authoring. The movie studios are still trying to gouge people for the HD quality, with the Blu-ray discs usually costing $10 more than the regular DVD release, but in many cases they have been including the regular DVD and an iTunes digital copy along with the Blu-ray package, adding reasonable value for the extra expense.
But let’s look at TV pricing for a moment. For example, season 5 of Lost lists for $79.99 and sells for $48.49 on Amazon on Blu-ray. This is for 1080p content, which is higher resolution than is broadcast on ABC. In contrast, iTunes charges $49.99 for 720p resolution and $34.99 for standard definition. However, note that Amazon is selling the standard definition DVD set for $24.99. (There are 20 episodes in this season).
Let’s look at another example. I’ve been watching through the first couple seasons of Supernatural, a show I came across a few months ago because iTunes was giving away a free episode. Season 1 costs … on iTunes, and is available on DVD from Amazon for $14.99. Supernatural started shooting in HD with its third season, and here the value proposition is even more disparate. Season 3 is available on Blu-ray from Amazon for $27.99 (list price:$69.98). On iTunes, the cost for the 16 episodes of season 3 is $46.99 HD, $30.99 SD. (On Amazon, episodes cost $1.99; the whole season is available for $18.99, however.)
DVD retailers seem to be discounting both Blu-ray and DVDs pretty aggressively in some cases, and I think the sooner that Apple can lower the prices of its television show offerings the better. Meanwhile, 1080p and an updated Apple TV might be nice, as well as the rumors of a subscription service.
See also:
iPad Surprise: Lower TV Episode Prices in iTunes? – Wired, February 12, 2010
iTunes New Pricing Structure is a Band-Aid – Wired, April 7, 2009
Music Industry Still Not Thrilled with iTunes Control - Ars Technica, Feb. 2, 2009
Despite iTunes Accord, Labels Still Fret – New York Times, Feb. 1, 2009
So, I bought Inglourious Basterds on Blu-Ray with Digital Copy. This is my second Digital Copy purchase, the first having been Wall-E last summer. At that time I noted that everything was failing because I started out trying to import the digital copy with iTunes running — it only worked then if iTunes was not running, and then it worked.
Today the experience was different, but still problematic. I happen to be running Parallels with Windows XP for some work I have to do occasionally, and it was running. I purposefully turned off iTunes, expecting a replay of last time, but found that nothing happened — I was in the Mac OS, not using the Parallels that I have set to Spaces 2.
So, what happened was this: Parallels took control of the disk, and for the 3 or 5 minutes I was waiting the Windows version of the “activate” window was waiting. Once I disconnected that drive from Parallels it showed up in the Mac, and double-clicking on the install drive launched iTunes.
File size, 1.92 GB. Am I surprised that there were problems? Not really, DRM is usually a problem.
This Christmas season it seems like the studios are trying to really throw value in, I’ve seen in the advertisements 3 or 4 disc combinations with BluRay, DVD, digital copy, and extras. Seems kind of like a stopgap measure, but as far as consumer value goes it’s all a plus.
Aug 112009
This rumor has been going around for a few weeks, that Apple was coming out with an enhanced multimedia album format called cocktail. Now, The Unofficial Apple Weblog adds more fuel, that there will be competing formats – link.
TUAW ends their rumor with this:
this promises to be a pretty decent fight.
Really? I don’t think so. I don’t see many people today that want to poke around a kind of crappy interface to see the front and back of the album cover, let alone pay more for the multimedia ‘enhancements.’ They would be wiser to just start including song lyrics embedded in the tracks sold by the iTunes Store.
May 252009
Just a couple notes, and a reference to this original article that explains how it works from a year ago:
First Look at iTunes Digital Copy – Macworld
http://www.macworld.com/article/131751/2008/01/digitalcopy.html
I had no reason to use this until a little over a month ago, I bought Wall-E and was anxious to try the Digital Copy feature. I put the special third disc in my MacBook, which already had iTunes running, and it would bring up the authorization box off of the disc in the finder, but the authorization process kept timing out. So I found that by closing iTunes, and having it be opened by the authorization program at the appropriate time, everything worked.
Just an FYI in case you are encountering frustration with the activation.
Jan 082009
Speculation on Jobs’ health — I know, I know.
Anyway, a clinical endocrinologist, followed up by some people that seem to know what they’re talking about:
link
Second post of interest today, by poster TS Low:
link
It’s an attempt by Apple to circumvent the music industry labels. iTunes is a preferred gateway to new music for many consumers already. But in order to get that music Apple is still having to use the intermediaries who own the distribution rights to those tracks.
Now Apple is creating a comprehensive 3-way link between the fan, the artist and Apple. At some point the traditional distribution medium and corporate apparatus will become moot under this arrangement as the artists will less and less rely on a label and can have the ability to interact with fans at a truly individual and personal level.
This poses an interesting proposition, that was mentioned at the dawn of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, that I haven’t heard voiced much lately. So it raises the question: Who will be the first artist to sign directly to iTunes? Those signed to labels would be lucky to get 10 cents, whereas the label gets to pocket the majority of the approx. 70 cents. Current labels would be reduced to selling back catalog.
How likely? Not sure.
Dec 182008
So, Gruber links to Ihnatko’s overly long, overly styled Sun-Times piece on the death of Macworld Expo. Shortly thereafter, Gruber links to Faruk Ateş’s excellent piece which calls Andy out on his assertion that every “game-changing” Apple announcement has been made at Macworld on a Tuesday morning, while noting that contrary to Ihnatko’s original claim the original iMac was not introduced at Macworld.
So, then Ihnatko comments on Ateş’s post: “Good catch on the iPod. The rest I think are a matter of opinion.” I agree with Faruk – calling the iTunes Store a “matter of opinion” sounds like the cream in someone’s Boston Creme Pie went sour.
To refresh your memory, Kirk McElhearn, on his blog Kirkville, wrote a post about movies disappearing from the iTunes Store On December 5th (2008). This was picked up by Macworld later that day. Still later in the day, I made a blog post (link) which summarized the conclusions made by the commenters on the Macworld site and noted that there was nothing strange about this.
The thing that made me write that post in the first place was that I expected Macworld to be somewhat professional, and write an email or call somebody or spend some time on a decent web search; that is, to perform a little research.
Well, the prize goes to CNET for actually doing some journalism and research, I have to call out practically everyone else for merely participating in a blogging echo chamber. My biggest problem with all of this is that all of the attributions go to Macworld, and not Kirkville. I guess the fact that McElhearn writes occasionally for Macworld somehow means that makes sense, but then again, he didn’t submit it to Macworld as a post for their site.
Anyway, the CNET piece by Greg Sandoval is really the best of the bunch:
And the culprit here is a system that for decades has pumped billions of dollars into the coffers of Hollywood studios and the television industry. What has happened is Apple and Netflix have crashed into windows. “Release windows” is the term used to describe periods of time a certain type of media is allowed to show a movie. Typically, a feature film is first released in theaters, then on DVD, followed by pay-per-view channels and finally on broadcast TV.
To reiterate the lessons learned, licensing is fluid, particularly movie licensing, and there is nothing to be alarmed about, such as the NBC/Universal debacle of 2007-8. Rather, they like to keep themselves busy by allowing licensing and taking it away. This creates the illusion of work and justifies the salaries of the executives at these companies.
As far as quality of comments go, I will give a tie to CNET and the second Ars Technica piece for quality. Meanwhile, a tardy bell for Cult of Mac for bringing up the rear, as it were, coming in last with nothing new to say.
Timeline of Posts
December 5
Kirkville : Where Have All the iTunes Store Movies Gone?. References: Original story.
Macworld: Movies disappearing from iTunes Store without a trace. References: Kirkville.
pooter.net/blog : iTunes Store Movie Disappearances – examined. References: Kirkville, Macworld.
December 8
Ars Technica – Infinite Loop (Justin Berka) : Certain movies disappearing from iTunes Store, cause unknown. References: Macworld.
December 9
CNET : TV has license to kill movies at iTunes, Netflix. References: Macworld, Original reporting!
December 10
AppleInsider : TV deals causing movies to disappear from iTunes Store. References: Macworld, CNET.
AllThings D : Now Not Showing at iTunes and Netflix: Some of Your Favorite Movies. References: CNET.
ZDNET – Apple Core (Jason O’Grady) : Studios throw the kill switch on Apple and Netflix. References: Macworld, CNET
Ars Technica – Infinite Loop (Jeff Smykil) : Disappearing iTunes Store movies: case closed?
Daring Fireball : “This is the sort of stupidity that drives even those who want to be honest customers toward bootlegging.” References: CNET.
December 11
Cult of Mac : Solved: Hollywood Behind Vanishing iTunes Movies. References: CNET