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As everyone probably knows after watching the Macworld 2008 keynote, the newest version of iTunes both for PCs/Macs and for the iPhone supports movie rentals. Eager to try this out (especially since I had some store credit left over from Christmas), I went to iTunes and I rented the latest Die Hard movie.
There were a couple of errors I received when attempting to rent the movie, but admittedly it was a Friday night and movie rentals is a new thing for the iTunes store - I'm pretty sure they were getting overloaded with rental requests. After only about 3 or 4 retries, I got the rental to fire off. The movie, a full-size DVD (non-HD), took about 30 minutes to download. Once downloaded, it informed me that I had 30 days to start watching the movie, and 24 hours to watch the movie.
As it turns out, you can watch the movie over and over again for as many times as you like during the 24 hour period. The entire experience was very, very seamless. Oh, and did I mention that I watched it once on my Macbook Pro and once on the iPhone? I love having movies on the go and the iPhone, despite the small form factor, is quite a good movie playing device.
There is only one thing that Apple needs to do in order to make the iTunes rental experience become the dominating force in movie rentals today... subscriptions. They should figure out what Netflix charges for its streamed rentals per month, and they should charge $1 less. That would be a clincher for sure. Then I wouldn't have to ponder whether I want to spend $4 on a given movie, if I'm paying monthly to download whatever movies I like.
On to Family Guy : Blue Harvest. I bought the DVD in the store, brought it home and popped the second DVD into the Macbook Pro's optical drive. I double-clicked the iTunes icon, entered the serial number, and about 40 seconds later I had a complete digital copy of the movie sitting in my iTunes library.
This is how movies should be done. Period. What most movie studios don't realize is that people like me, and average Joes all over the country have been positively begging for a reason to buy their movies. People don't actually want to pirate the movies, they want their digital movies to be brain-dead-simple and convenient. The family guy digital copy was ridiculously convenient. I can now copy that movie to the iPhone, I can drag it into popcorn and burn a DVD with that 40 minute video clip and maybe 1 or 2 other Family Guy episodes and make my own family guy mix DVD. I can absolutely guarantee that if more movies come with digital copies in the box, people will buy more boxed movies instead of pirating them. DRM is an annoyance that serves to piss off regular consumers and simply slow down hackers. If you want to please regular consumers, give me DRM-free, dead-simple and convenient movies that I can copy to whatever device I want, and I will purchase more movies.
If people keep pulling the same old bullshit where CDs are "enhanced" with extra crap so that they cannot be ripped into iTunes or Windows Media Player - I will stop buying CDs. The formula is really simple:
- Convenient and unhindered access to media that you legitimately purchased == people buy more stuff.
- Annoying pain in the ass jumping through hoops and arbitrary security that usually backfires on legitimate owners == people will pirate more stuff.
I'm looking forward to watching Family Guy : Blue Harvest on my iPhone and renting new releases from iTunes instead of my cable company.
"DRM is an annoyance that serves to piss off regular consumers and simply
slow down hackers. "
If there is a .NET/Cocoa book being written, it's being written without me
completing it. I wrote the first four chapters of the book and then a
mutual decision was reached to stop the project. I like giving the code
samples away on the blog better anyway :)
Bummer about the book. I was looking forward to a comparison of the two
frameworks. At least there's your blog.
I LOVED the Blue Harvest Digital Copy. That was so convenient all I could
do during the entire 3 minutes I was downloading and moving BH to my iPod
was go "oh wow.. it can't be this easy". Without that I'd have to -
circumvent copy protection - rip to my harddrive - turn it into something
iPod-friendly with Handbrake-etc etc etc.
Making it simple is exactly correct. Even without DRM, if making digital
copies is not brain-dead simple, then the non-techy consumers will continue
to use P2P networks to get their digital entertainment because it makes it
easy to get it onto their MP3 or video player.
