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While the big wigs in television and movie production keep insisting "new media" is a long ways off or just pipe dream of a few techno-geeks, there are these interesting paragraphs regarding the rumors of what's coming out of the Macworld Expo --
Movie Rentals on iTunes
Can Apple transform how we watch movies the way it changed how we listen to music? BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal are reporting that Apple, which already sells first-run Disney movies through its online store, is hammering out rental agreements with Disney as well as with Warner Bros., Lion's Gate and Paramount. One potential sticking point has been pricing. The recording industry hates the 99 cents per song standard, and it appears unlikely that the film industry will go along with a similar flat pricing structure—they want flexibility. Exact details of how the rental system would work are scarce, but it seems likely that the rented movie would live on your hard drive for a predetermined amount of time (24 hours or a week) and then disappear.
Rip DVDs onto iTunes
The Financial Times is reporting that Apple is also hammering out a deal to license its FairPlay digital rights management scheme to Fox so users would be able to rip Fox DVDs onto iTunes, a first for Apple, which has historically been nervous about compromising the integrity of its encryption. Taken together with Sony's new Amazon partnership, could this signal the coming end of DRM? (Original article here.)
Looks like a whole hell of a lot of new media is in the offering right now. And not just any new media, but legitimate, licensed new media. Apple is also offering machines whose hard drives can hold terabytes of information. I don't care how many documents and photos you have, the only reason the average consumer would need terabytes of storage is if they plan on storing a large amount of digital movies/shows.
Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox and much more) once proclaimed that he would never license his shows to something like iTunes because no one want to watch the shows on that format and therefore (most importantly) he would never be able to make any money off of it. It was only a couple of months later that iTunes started carrying Fox shows. Now Murdoch is looking to increase the viewership base in that very same "new media" that he so loudly dismissed. Any you know, Rupert Murdoch doesn't strike me as the kind to give anything away. If there wouldn't be profit to be made, he wouldn't be wasting his time.
The last time the writers were in negotiations they all fell for the line that "new media" -- AKA DVDs -- where untested and too expensive and no one would ever think of buying them. Financially, there was just no way for the studios to make money off a $20+ DVD that only cost them a few cents to produce.
Sound familiar? It should. Right now the studios are stating that there is no way for them to make a profit off a product that, once it is digital, won't require any additional production costs.
Just how stupid do the studio executives think the public is?
No. Wait. Don’t answer that.
Movie Rentals on iTunes
Can Apple transform how we watch movies the way it changed how we listen to music? BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal are reporting that Apple, which already sells first-run Disney movies through its online store, is hammering out rental agreements with Disney as well as with Warner Bros., Lion's Gate and Paramount. One potential sticking point has been pricing. The recording industry hates the 99 cents per song standard, and it appears unlikely that the film industry will go along with a similar flat pricing structure—they want flexibility. Exact details of how the rental system would work are scarce, but it seems likely that the rented movie would live on your hard drive for a predetermined amount of time (24 hours or a week) and then disappear.
Rip DVDs onto iTunes
The Financial Times is reporting that Apple is also hammering out a deal to license its FairPlay digital rights management scheme to Fox so users would be able to rip Fox DVDs onto iTunes, a first for Apple, which has historically been nervous about compromising the integrity of its encryption. Taken together with Sony's new Amazon partnership, could this signal the coming end of DRM? (Original article here.)
Looks like a whole hell of a lot of new media is in the offering right now. And not just any new media, but legitimate, licensed new media. Apple is also offering machines whose hard drives can hold terabytes of information. I don't care how many documents and photos you have, the only reason the average consumer would need terabytes of storage is if they plan on storing a large amount of digital movies/shows.
Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox and much more) once proclaimed that he would never license his shows to something like iTunes because no one want to watch the shows on that format and therefore (most importantly) he would never be able to make any money off of it. It was only a couple of months later that iTunes started carrying Fox shows. Now Murdoch is looking to increase the viewership base in that very same "new media" that he so loudly dismissed. Any you know, Rupert Murdoch doesn't strike me as the kind to give anything away. If there wouldn't be profit to be made, he wouldn't be wasting his time.
The last time the writers were in negotiations they all fell for the line that "new media" -- AKA DVDs -- where untested and too expensive and no one would ever think of buying them. Financially, there was just no way for the studios to make money off a $20+ DVD that only cost them a few cents to produce.
Sound familiar? It should. Right now the studios are stating that there is no way for them to make a profit off a product that, once it is digital, won't require any additional production costs.
Just how stupid do the studio executives think the public is?
No. Wait. Don’t answer that.
