Released earlier this Spring, Apple TV seemed poised to take on the movie industry by offering select downloads from their iTunes service featuring a robust catalog of movies. With Disney already on board with Apple offering new releases and several other smaller studios offering titles from their older collection, Apple already offers some 500 movies. This new wave of film availability has sent the bigger movie moguls reeling.
The likes of Sony, Universal and 20th Century Fox will be missing from the iTunes list until they can see Apple implement a more viable plan for battling internet piracy. Additionally, these studios, along with a few others, believe that offering the convenience of downloading movies for a discounted rate through Apple's service will inevitably drive the price of DVDs down. With DVD sales being the industry's bread and butter, and with many poised to make their money from the next generation disks, this poses a huge business threat for future productivity.
Apple has already proven with the music industry that it could single handedly force the price of CD sales down. For years, the average price for a CD was $13. Since the release of iTunes, research shows a significant reduction in pricing. This move was achieved by a sweet talking Steve Jobs who had convinced the music industry at the time that his 99 cent downloads would battle the rampant internet piracy that the industry was facing. Most of the record labels jumped on board and touted Jobs as their savior.
The movie studios are fearful that a similar thing can happen with movies. By offering a lower price for new releases and with Apple TV's ability to stream content to the consumer's television, this could severely impact the DVD market in both cost and amount of units sold.
Another major concern is the fact that Apple's vulnerable iPod can play any mp3 music that is loaded into it, regardless of whether or not it was purchased by legitimate means or not. The movie industry says they are waiting for something along the lines of a digital watermark to be implemented so that the media will not play on Apple TV unless the watermark is present.
The big name labels are still in talks with Apple to negotiate how to handle the next wave of digital convenience. No word yet on whether or not the way you view your movies will change in the near future.
Source:
LA Times
Written by: Dave Horvath @ 12 Jun 2007 18:20
