Apple to (possibly) sell movies online

[medea]

"Apple Computer May Sell Movies Online, Berliner Zeitung Says
July 14, 2003 17:59 EDT -- Apple Computer Inc., maker of the iMac personal computer, may start to sell movies online after the success of its iTunes music technology, Berliner Zeitung said, citing Pascal Cagni, the company's Vice President, Europe."

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...ws&tkr=AAPL:US

[bennetsaysargh]

im confused. how will they do this? movies are way too big to download. if they think that buying music online is long for dialup users, think about this!
they already have the record industry on thier case, now the movies? lol
at least they are increasing the digital hub and iLife!

[Freg3000]

I think Apple is looking into the future on this one. They see down the line, when practically everyone in the United States and the world has broadband. But by then, broadband will probably be a thing of the past, and many people will have blazingly fast speeds compared to today. At that time, this won't be so weird. I can see this happening in 2005/2006.

Now, if Apple uses the Pixlet codec.....I don't think anyone will have a good enough connection for the next 5 years before they can download a movie that large in a reasonable amount of time.

[evil]

i may be a bit computer dumb...but is pixlet like the AAC of movie files?

[TyleRomeo]

Originally posted by Freg3000
I think Apple is looking into the future on this one. They see down the line, when practically everyone in the United States and the world has broadband. But by then, broadband will probably be a thing of the past, and many people will have blazingly fast speeds compared to today. At that time, this won't be so weird. I can see this happening in 2005/2006.

Now, if Apple uses the Pixlet codec.....I don't think anyone will have a good enough connection for the next 5 years before they can download a movie that large in a reasonable amount of time.

thats why they have mpeg-4 and aac which will soon be in 5.1. so once everyone has broadband or something faster, a 200Mb movie wont be so bad. besides, it's apple, they'll think of something.

tyler

[Jerry Spoon]

Digitally storing full movies downloaded from apple...What size hard drive are you going to need for that? 200 Mb apiece? The new iPod...150 feature length movies in your pocket!

[BaghdadBob]

Not much of a stretch, but, I think not. I think this is just a logical jump, not really a near possibility, and if we're talking about possibilities that are not near then I guess we can discuss how Apple is preparing for the encorporation of 20 GHz processors with OS XI.

[whfsdude]

Light DRM, I'd buy. But I don't think it will happen :-(

[Mosco]

Originally posted by TyleRomeo
thats why they have mpeg-4 and aac which will soon be in 5.1. so once everyone has broadband or something faster, a 200Mb movie wont be so bad. besides, it's apple, they'll think of something.

tyler

Even in Mpeg-4, the movies will be alot bigger than 200 Mb. Even in Xvid, it has to be like 700Mb atleast to look "only" ok.

I just read up on Pix, 20-25:1 compression. So i guess 250 is not all that bad. That would be pretty cool.

[TyleRomeo]

Originally posted by Jerry Spoon
Digitally storing full movies downloaded from apple...What size hard drive are you going to need for that? 200 Mb apiece? The new iPod...150 feature length movies in your pocket!

what else are you going to store on these new SATA drives that will hit over 500GB by next year.

Tyler

[MrMacMan]

Not Suprising, but will probably have some sort of super mega block on it so you can't watch it off your mac.

Which will create a controversy... and people will try and will eventually crack it... etc.

[Waluigi]

It takes me about one to two hours to download a 1GB movie depending on the connection speed with my cable modem. I'm assuming apple will have no problem on their end sending out the movies, but until the average consumer can download a full HD movie in 5 to 15 minutes (yes, I know, it sounds ridiculous), this is just not plausible.

I really love this idea, and I hope apple will take a few years to set up the frame work for the contracts, and user interface, to make this whole thing work. Hopefully by then, internet speeds will increase enough to make it all happen, because right now that is the single limiting factor.

--Waluigi

[frozenstar]

This stuff is not far off. The technology is already there. Using Pixlet, a sustained throughput of 300kbps is sufficient to watch a DVD-quality movie while it downloads.

[tazo]

If they are reasonably priced then i would buy from apple

[Plastic Chicken]

Pixlet is NOT a good codec for over the internet. It's designed for Pixar to send stuff around the studio at full rez without artifacts. It's still VERY heavy in size, but 20:1 compared to raw data. 3MB/second Apple's site says. That's 21Gb for a whole movie. I'm assuming 3MB/s is the high def spec, so half of high def (which is probably what they would distribute) would be 5 gigs for a whole movie. (I'm assuming a two-hour movie...now, Lawrence of Arabia...)

[frozenstar]

Originally posted by Plastic Chicken
Pixlet is NOT a good codec for over the internet. It's designed for Pixar to send stuff around the studio at full rez without artifacts. It's still VERY heavy in size, but 20:1 compared to raw data. 3MB/second Apple's site says. That's 21Gb for a whole movie. I'm assuming 3MB/s is the high def spec, so half of high def (which is probably what they would distribute) would be 5 gigs for a whole movie. (I'm assuming a two-hour movie...now, Lawrence of Arabia...)

You're right. I was looking at the ratio in comparison to a 6GB DVD, but I neglected to recall that DVDs are already massively compressed using MPEG2.

[Tha_Sylent1]

I could be mistaken but I thought I read an article about incorporating 26Megabit broadband into US households in the future perhaps along with access from every socket in your house. In the near future though i can't exactly recall...

[Mosco]

I also forgot that. SO i am guessing that they probably would use Mpeg-4 and multichannel AAC. Those files would be huge.

[Nermal]

I don't think bandwidth will be too much of an issue, not at the consumer's end anyway. Let's say the movies are about 700 MB, that's about 1:30 on a 1 Mb/s connection, which means that your average movie would be able to play in "real-time" while you download it. Let's say you've got a 768k connection, that's about 30 mins of buffering at the start of the movie, which is probably similar to the time it'd take you to drive down to the local video store, find and buy the movie, come home, and prepare chips and dip (I live in a smallish town and it might take way more than 30 mins to do this in a city).

I don't know what the average connection speed is for most people. Different countries have substantially different broadband offerings - over here in NZ you can get a 128k or 256k flatrate connection (most people go for 128), or you can get a "full speed" (up to 8 Mb/s) connection but you have to pay by the MB. Therefore most people go for the flat-rate. I hope this changes in the future - the DSL pricing structure hasn't been revised in the last 4 years!

OK, I'll stop ranting...

[sb11710]

This would not stop me of buying DVD's.

[Sun Baked]

Digital video on demand was the Holy Grail of cable companies -- and all the money they spent chasing that dream resulted in their biggest boondoggle to date.

Of course Apple could be firing a Reagan-like (Star Wars) shot across MS's bow to get them to spend enough money to dry up the champagne flowing through Bill's bidet.

[LethalWolfe]

I'm curious as to what goal Apple would have in mind for this. Why would I want to purchase a sub DVD quality movie that I could only watch on/play from my computer? Or, why would I rent/stream a poor/marginal quality movie on my computer when many cable and satillite providers are starting to offer true video on demand?


Lethal

[sebimeyer]

The Berliner Zeitung is hardly what I would call a reputable newspaper. I have read it a couple of times and I would likely compare it with the New York Post, and we all know what garbled half truths they reported about both iPod and iTMS.

[tex210]

Then you could keep the quality and watch on your regular dvd players.

[Shrike_Priest]

This is my hypothesis, which I see as fairly plausible:

Quicktime Movie Store.

Has movies in MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1. Now, when Apple announced MPEG-4, they had a DVD, and the same movie in MPEG-4, that was only one tenth as big, and it looked pretty equal. Granted, this was on a keynote, so I can't judge that much.

But anyway, if it can look failry decent at 10 times less (which would be like 600MB-700MB file, perhaps 800MB with 5.1 AAC. If H.264 is incorporated into MPEG-4, we might even see significantly smaller files, if it's as good as they claim (they claimed DVD-ish quality at 1,5Mbit/Sec)

Now, in a few years, downloading 800Mb might be fairly easy for a LOT of users. If they manage to get FTCP on the market, it will definately be possible.

Now, you would download it from QTMS, and perhaps as someone said, only buffer it and then watch when it has downloaded enough to not "break" in the middle. And with Apple's servers, they would probably be able to deliver fairly steady download speed.

Once you have it on your computer, iDVD will let you encode it to MPEG-2/Dolby 5.1 and burn it onto a DVD. Perhaps iDVD could automatically download meny-themese corresponding with the movie.

Voila.

Still, this is a good five-six years away. but I don't think it's impossible.