October 13, 2005

Apple's new video iPod

David Pogue of the NYT Circuits section has a weekly newsletter which doesn't run at the paper's website. (Whoops...now it does.) You can subscribe to it, and I do. Here's part of what he said about Apple's new deal with Disney/ABC:

This $2-per-episode pricing, by the way, blows my mind. How on earth did Apple persuade ABC/Disney to sell its shows for $2 an episode? Remember, we live in an era of rampant greed and paranoia in the TV industry. The only other legal TV-show downloading service I've encountered is the Akimbo box, which costs $10 a month AND $3 to $5 per episode AND your downloads expire in 30 days! My guess? Disney, which owns ABC, made this concession as part of a larger negotiation with Mr. Jobs in an effort to persuade him to renew Pixar's distribution deal with Disney.

In any case, $2 per TV show is a brilliant price. It's low enough to be an impulse buy -- when, for example, you missed an episode; it isn't high enough to drive you to using Bit Torrent or another illegal download source; but it's high enough to bring in some extra income to the TV companies. (Remember, the alternative would be $0. Why not make a little cash from episodes that have already been broadcast?) Here's hoping the other networks will get on board at the same price.

Good points. I hadn't given it much thought, since I'm not in the market for another $300-400 gadget, but that price is astonishing. It's unclear to me whether you could upload the ABC shows to your PC to watch them on a larger screen, but that would make it an even bigger plus.

Posted by Linkmeister at October 13, 2005 10:01 AM | TrackBack
Comments

You can burn the video files to a CD and move them from machine to machine, so long as the machines are authorized (only 5 at a time may be). I don't know if this is available on the PC side of things yet, but since iTunes is cross-platform and we're only talking about Quicktime video files AND it's the same DRM that Apple uses on its iTMS purchases, I don't see why they wouldn't.

The real problem is that Apple has really boxed itself in with the iTunes bran. So now we buy TV shows from, um, the music store.

Yeah. That makes sense.

Posted by: Scott at October 14, 2005 04:19 AM

Well, on the Windows side we still click "Start" to power down, so it's only fitting that Apple have its own anomaly.

Posted by: Linkmeister at October 14, 2005 08:35 AM

The demos of this service had a pretty ghastly "vhs quality" resolution - have you heard any word on whether/when they plan to improve this?

On a tv-related note, darn you for getting me addicted to Lost! ;-)

Posted by: skarlet at October 14, 2005 11:59 AM

They are, at the moment, either in mpeg-4 or h.264 format. I've only viewed an MP4 (of Night Stalker), which was perfectly watchable on my laptop.

h.264 is a pretty processor-intensive codec, but the quality can be stunning (this will be the new format for DVD). MPEG-4 is perfectly servicable (it's what most of the movie trailers at Apple.com are encoded in) and very efficient codec. To put it in perspective, VCDs are MPEG-1 (and MP3s are MPEG-1 layer 3). DVDs are encoded in MPEG-2, which is much older and far less efficient than MPEG-4. h.264 is even better than MPEG-4.

To sum up: I've never understood why people get bent out of shape by "VHS quality" (which usually means MPEG-1), since that's what TIVO records in and no one seems to complain. ;)

Posted by: Scott at October 14, 2005 06:13 PM

It's the principle of it ;-)

Posted by: skarlet at October 20, 2005 04:14 PM