Apple To Sell Movies Through iTunes–But Why Bother?

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

BusinessWeek Online is reporting that Apple will soon announce the sale of full-length films through its iTunes music store. The BuisinessWeek story also includes one more interesting detail: the price. Apple plans to price movies at around $14.99 for newer releases and $9.99 for older titles. That may sound like a good deal if you’re still buying most of your movies from brick and mortar retailers, but after having switched to using online stores such as Amazon.com almost exclusively, this pricing structure has left me scratching my head.

First off, the movies you download are certainly going to be restricted with Apple DRM. This will likely mean headaches for anyone wishing to watch their movies on more than one computer, much less burn them to DVD’s for offline viewing–something I doubt will be possible since consumer DVD burners cannot burn retail DVD’s CSS copy protection. So, DVD’s burned from iTunes would likely be unprotected from copying and piracy…something I have a feeling the RIAA wouldn’t go for. Whether or not you’ll be able to burn DVD’s of the movies you download leads to another question: what kind of extra content will there be included? Will these movies have the extra features one gets with normal DVD’s? The reason I wonder about this is because frequently movies use dual-layer DVD discs which offer almost twice the capacity of regular DVD’s. This allows the DVD makers to add in extra features and keep the movie uncompressed. It seems doubtful that Apple will include these extra features in movie downloads in order to save space.

My next misgiving is the price. At almost $15 per movie, you’re really not getting that great of a deal. Just look at what average new DVD releases cost at Amazon. For example, as of the time of this writing V for Vendetta which was just released to DVD in August is selling for $15.87. That’s less than one dollar more than what Apple will sell movies for, and you can get free shipping if your order goes over $25. For that extra $0.88 you get a pressed DVD (which will last longer than a burned DVD and longer than your hard drive or iPod) that comes in nice packaging that will also keep it safe. This pressed DVD can be played on any of your DVD players or computers without having to transfer a multi-gigabyte file around, deal with messy Apple DRM, and at full-quality. In comparison, when you purchase a movie from the iTunes store you’re going to have to download it. That means that the main advantage of online purchasing will be almost negated as downloading a couple of gigabytes will take most people a few hours or more on their home internet connections. Additionally, while you’re downloading the movie on iTunes you may be maxing out your bandwidth (unless Apple lets you throttle your speed at the cost of an even longer download time) which could take a toll on online gaming and possibly web browsing. To save space, Apple may decide to compress the movies. However, that will mean decreased quality from that regular DVD which would only cost about $1 more.

The way I see it, downloadable movies from iTunes will be a rip-off for the consumer and not worth purchasing though it’s unclear whether or not that will actually stop it from being a success. I still don’t think that the $0.99 music tracks from iTunes are a great deal for many of the same reasons above, however I do acknowledge that they allow you to download a single song out of an entire album and save money on an otherwise mediocre album. Movies don’t have that advantage, though. You’re either getting everything or nothing. You certainly can’t cut out some boring scenes and decrease the price anyway. Online distribution costs orders of magnitude less money than traditional methods, so why are the movies still so expensive? Surely the electricity and bandwidth for Apples servers aren’t as expensive as Amazon’s employees that organize and run their distribution centers. And the packaging and media that comes with regular DVD purchases may not be too expensive, but it certainly isn’t free either. All I can say is that the savings by the companies participating in online movie downloads certainly are not being passed on to the consumer. Until I start to see value in downloadable movies, I’ll be sticking with plain, old regular DVD’s.