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Apple to Debut 'HD+' 1080p iTunes Movie Services Later This Year?

Maybe off topic a bit, but I want to know...

Any rumors of blu-ray players and/or burners going into Macs in the near future?
 
RobQuads said:
lol @ "HD+"

More like at last we now have "HD-" an upgrade from "HD--" we had before.

Still a mile away from the 30/40Mbps that you get on BluRays
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Let me know when bandwidth is so prevalent that such a hog that is Blu-Ray effortlessly becomes deployed on a nation-wide basis.

Blu-Ray will be surpassed by other formats long before Joe Six Pack has 40Mbps down.
 
Small White Car said:
My "search" has been what I call "Using Netflix."

It's nice that they're adding titles but I have not come across any as I use Netflix so I consider that more theoretical than practical. Once I start encountering 1080p on Netflix I'll start counting them.

At any rate, I find it all a bit pointless. I would much rather have a higher-bitrate 720p file thath looks sharp than a squishy 1080p file at a lower bitrate. It remains to be seen what Apple would be providing.
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The fact that you personally have not seen a 1080p title on Netflix, does NOT entitle you to deny such availability, as you did.

Plus, Netflix offers 5.1 sound.

Plus, Netflix has a reasonable subscription model, while Apple does not. Now that Amazon is offering unlimited streaming too, for less than $80 per year, Apple will have an even tougher time competing with their overpriced model. Just my 2c.
 
Bye bye Blu Ray, this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for Blu Ray and Apple.

It should be the beginning of the end for Blu Ray as a whole since the price of a new release in 1080P on iTunes should be substantially cheaper than any Blu Ray disks I've seen for sale.

It can't be too much longer before optical drives start being phased out.
 
Even if I don't download movies from iTunes, is it worth waiting for a 1080 Apple TV?
 
Xtremehkr said:
Bye bye Blu Ray, this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for Blu Ray and Apple.

It should be the beginning of the end for Blu Ray as a whole since the price of a new release in 1080P on iTunes should be substantially cheaper than any Blu Ray disks I've seen for sale.

It can't be too much longer before optical drives start being phased out.
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Tell that to the people I see everyday without an internet connection. I am quite lucky to get 3 Mb (2.4 actual) myself.
 
Huh? 720p IS HD. So is 1080p. Is it odd to call 1080p, "HD+"? I guess, but 720p IS intact HD people.
 
1080p… what a joke. 99% of the people want 1080p will be watching on an improperly calibrated television set, positioned for aesthetic value (usually over the fireplace) blind to the visual artifacts from the massive compression needed to stuff it down the mediocre bandwidth we have in America. Blissfully unaware of the copious amounts of DNR to reduce that pesky grain (why can I see grain on my HD television?!).

America has turned in to Nigel Tufnel – “Yeah but these go to 11!”
 
paradox00 said:
Unrelated, but I'd like to see some innovation in the rental and purchase area. I doubt Apple will ever go to an unlimited streaming model and the studios don't like doing that for new releases anyway, but would it really be too much to ask for a discount on the purchase of a movie if you've already paid to rent it earlier? It would sure make renting for evaluation purposes a lot more attractive.
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I absolutely agree. Once you've used the bandwidth to rent a movie, why not be able to buy it if you really like it. Fair enough if it costs more than simply buying it - but should cost less than renting + buying combined, and a big saving on bandwidth not having to download it twice.
 
iMikeT said:
It looks like I might be done buying physical media.
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I suspect we're a long way off that.

I would much prefer to buy from iTunes - but still I recently found myself buying a cheap blu ray player because 1) the are a lot of films not on iTunes (eg. Star wars, Lord of the Rings etc etc) 2) of the films on iTunes the vast majority are in SD (not even 720p) - so even when they introduce 1080p it's likely to be a very long time before all films are available at that quality, and 3) blu ray discs are often much cheaper than buying films on iTunes in HD (even at 720p), 4) blu ray discs have some re-sale value.
 
Xtremehkr said:
Bye bye Blu Ray, this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for Blu Ray and Apple.

It should be the beginning of the end for Blu Ray as a whole since the price of a new release in 1080P on iTunes should be substantially cheaper than any Blu Ray disks I've seen for sale.

It can't be too much longer before optical drives start being phased out.
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I've never understood, people who claim this.

The infrastructure is nowhere near present to handle full HD downloads. It can barely cope with the amount of data flowing through it at the moment.

Don't know where your looking, but we get Blu-Rays for under £10 now - less than $15. Which is cheaper than anything Apple will offer the UK.
 
If Apple brought their H.264 encoder up to the level of efficiency of x264 and MainConcept, they could shave a third off that bit rate.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

Not HD until it has HD Audio
 
Primejimbo said:
Yea because YouTube is a great site to watch full length movies. :rolleyes:
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You don't get it, do you?

The point is that the technology to watch 1080p video online is already here, not that those sites are ideal to watching full-length movies. It's just a bigger file on the server. A 120-minute movie is basically the same a playlist of thirty 4-minute videos.

Besides, doesn't Netflix do this?

My guess is that you can watch full-length pornos in streaming 1080p.
 
At 10MBps that's almost 9GB for a 120min movie. I'm not sure that sending that much data down the pipe is really feasible for a large number of people. I have no doubt that it will become ever more feasible over time, I just don't think that's realistic today or within the next couple of years if you want to maintain the "Click it, Watch it" sort of experience that most people expect.

Current iTunes HD purchases average around 3-5Mbps, so this is effectively doubling or tripling the amount of data (and hence the loading time).

(Not to mention that with only 8GB of onboard storage, all ATV2's would likely have to be replaced with newer devices)

In my experience, the difference between 720p and 1080p on a screen smaller than 50" does not deliver a substantially improved experience to justify the extra costs involved to deliver the increased resolution.
 
I wonder if they'll do a Movies+ arrangement like they did with music when they went DRM free that lets those of us who have iTunes HD content to get the larger files.
 
G4DP said:
I've never understood, people who claim this.

The infrastructure is nowhere near present to handle full HD downloads. It can barely cope with the amount of data flowing through it at the moment.

Don't know where your looking, but we get Blu-Rays for under £10 now - less than $15. Which is cheaper than anything Apple will offer the UK.
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In the largest markets the infrastructure is in place. I'm in Phoenix and I have 20mb/s service at a price that continues to fall.

There is infrastructure development in place to bring high speed internet to the majority of people in the country. Even if it has to be wireless deployment, it's like the rural electrification program that was undertaken when electricity was a fairly new thing.

It makes far more sense to invest in Internet infrastructure development than it does to rely on the current model for the distribution of digital content.

There is Internet technology in development that will vastly improve the performance of existing infrastructure without the need to change much of what's in the ground.

There is far more to be gained from developing the internet in the long run.
 
I'm not big on iTunes, I use Netflix, I think Apple would do much better if they had service similar to Netflix, the pricing on rentals on iTunes is still fairly expensive..
 
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