Digital Journal — It’s difficult to repeat a success as lucrative as iTunes, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs is sure as hell going to try. As music lovers continue to line up to download tunes for a dollar apiece, rumours are now surfacing that Apple wants to launch a film download service. Sounds kosher, but will film fans really fork over $10 for a movie they can get free (albeit illegally) on BitTorrent? In what could be the worst move for a tech company looking to find another revenue stream, Jobs wants to naively marry Hollywood with the digital revolution.
According to showbiz newspaper Daily Variety, Apple is planning to offer movie downloads on the company’s popular iTunes Music Store site. Citing unnamed sources, Variety said iTunes might begin selling films by the end of 2006 for $9.99 (US) each.
Negotiations have reportedly been going on for months between Jobs and movie studios such as Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and the Walt Disney Company. While Apple has discussed a film-iTunes deal before, studio execs are now listening more intently to Jobs’ proposals because of iTunes’ foray into TV show downloads.
“Steve wants to get this done, and the studios want to reach an agreement, too,” said one person privy to the negotiations, according to the New York Times.
But should Apple pursue this star-studded avenue? Sure, a catalogue of A-list titles such as King Kong and Crash will attract attention. Of course, people are already downloading films so it’s only natural for Apple to try to cash in on a popular trend. But film is different than music, a fact Jobs is essentially ignoring.
We buy music and rent movies. Tunes are worth keeping while a flick is just as fleeting as its name — easily digestible, then snapped out of the DVD player to be returned to Blockbuster. Since Jobs wants to apply a fixed price for every film, he’s assuming his iTunes music fans will be converted into die-hard film fanatics.
The problem is we don’t line our shelves with DVDs like we stuff our hard drives with MP3s. If Jobs is trying to convert movie renters into movie buyers, he’s attempting a feat Hollywood studios can’t even accomplish.
Blame illegal downloading for sparking this idea in Jobs’ ever expansive mind, but BitTorrent isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, last month the peer-to-peer file-sharing system signed a deal with Warner Bros. to offer legal films to download. The partnership took some flak for trying to “Napster-ize” movie downloading — basically, making people pay for what they were already doing free.
Sticking to its $10-a-movie rule is also foolish for Apple. The older a movie gets, the less expensive it is to rent or buy. Unlike fine wine, movies don’t get better with age, they lose their lustre and popularity the longer they sit on the shelf. Who is going to pay $10 for Three Men and a Baby or Ghostbusters? Not me. Even paying $10 for new releases is bullshit since I can rent the same thing for $5 and not wait several hours while it downloads.
Bringing movies to iTunes is renewing speculation that Apple will introduce a living room-oriented entertainment device later this year. The tech industry is whispering that Jobs may use the Internet to deliver high-definition video directly to consumers on flat-screen televisions (although critics still scoff at the idea of distributing bandwidth-hungry HD content over the ‘Net).
The movie-iTunes partnership will make sense only if Jobs can release a platform with higher resolutions; bigger screens than iPods; and for prices that are just as flexible as video store rates.
When Jobs follows up this announcement with a more practical move to bring a downloadable Hollywood to our living room, he’ll make me a believer. Until then, this is just another bloated Tinsel Town plot.
