Buy Option!

[MacFabulous]

The prize?

How much does it cost? What´s the price compared to renting?

 

[IlluminatedSage]

So the good news is that there are TONS of brand spanking new movies like "Juno", "Cloverfield", "Walk Hard" that popped up on Apple TV all of a sudden, and the even better news is that the mysterious option to buy instead of rent a movie popped up all of a sudden, but the bad news is that all these super-new releases only have the "Buy" option, you can't rent them yet.
Weak!
I wonder if this is a marketing strategy on Apple's part, where the people who really want the movie have the option to buy for the first 30 days (because buying has a higher profit margin) then everyone else has the opportunity to rent only afterwards.

Not a bad or unworkable idea, but I think it would be annoying to have to keep checking back to see if you can rent a given video yet.

What do y'all think?

I know that the movie studios have varying tiers on release windows. Some titles have 1 - 1 1/2 months avail on Blu-Ray, DVD and now Purchase on apple tv/itunes as well as other outlets, prior to its avail as a ppv/vod.

this is unfortunately the way they are getting home video outlets to keep their margins, if they let people ppv a movie for $3-4 immediately, they would lose their highest end customers of discs/movies

 

[pjarvi]

While I love that all movies now appear to be available for purchase, the AppleTV hard drive is too small to fit everything. Movies were the first thing I stopped syncing when I ran out of space.

 

[mambodancer]

Thanks for the link

Yes, but you will be subject to DRM (if that matters to you) - you can't every watch them outside of what the studio "lets you".

I'm hearing the studios want to go to pay-per-view for everything eventually.

Your LD collection, there are plenty of online places that will buy them from you:

http://www.laserdiscvault.com/


Some, not available on DVD, look like they've actually increased in price.

Thanks for the link. Now to see what I can get for my collection. Anyone want to buy a Pioneer laserdisc player and collection before I go to the laservault or ebay?

 

[sanford]

What can you do with purchased movies. Can I legally burn a copy for use in my car? Will I be able to download them onto my Tivo so I can play them there?

Yes, you can legally burn a copy for use in your car. (Which is kind of odd, really. I hope it's for your passengers.) But you can't *practically* burn a copy for use in your car due to the DRM. But, take heart, you're not purchasing the movie, you're licensing the movie for an infinite number of non-concurrent, non-commercial personal viewings. You own that license when you buy a DVD, a Blu-ray (or a heavily discounted HD DVD), or an iTunes DRM-protected digital download movie. And a license is a license is a license.

Oh, you could rent OR buy older movies for a long time via Apple TV, at least ten days. Just not new releases. So if that was a glitch it lasted a while.

 

[sanford]

For the youngsters out there (I'm 48), here is my take on why I am done buying DVD's.

Bought a movie in the 80's on VHS video tape (glad I didn't buy it on Beta)

Bought my movies on Laserdisc (glad I didn't buy it on RCA video discs or DIVX)

Bought my movies on DVD

Buying movies as digital downloads (glad I didn't buy HD DVD)

After seeing how the medium changes from various formats of tape, disc and DVD formats, I've lost any interest in investing in the medium or the players required to play them. BluRay is only the latest iteration in a long list of format changes. It'll probably be around for at least 5-7 years before the next format change and the next "gimmick" to try and get consumers to repurchase the movies they may have already purchased in an older format. A digital copy protects my investment in the movies I like to watch (more than once) for the foreseeable future (probably indefinite future). I'm not interested in a piece of plastic that just takes up space on a shelf somewhere in my house and that really only has a shelf life of about 10-20 years anyway.

In my opinion, a good solution would be to place a digital download, at various resolutions, on the BluRay disc. The disc would have all the special features that some people seem to like and serve as a back up for those that wish to watch on their computers, media players, etc. It also has the advantage of being region independent and the most compatible of formats available with the smallest hardware requirements.

Anybody seriously interested in a Laserdisc collection of about 3-400 discs? Many criterion editions.

40 years ancient here, and I briefly considered selling my couple hundred Laserdiscs, too. The only one not worth mere pennies on the dollar, even on eBay where you get a bit of a premium, is Wenders's Until The End of The World. There's a Wenders DVD collection sans UTEOTW available in the States, although hard to find, and apparently UTEOTW is available region-coded in the EU on DVD, but it's either out of print and hard to find, or barely in print and still hard to find, even if I cared to go to the trouble to import it.

Our Laserdiscs look great on our HDTVs which have built in upscalers of high quality; it's not pure HD quality, but it's just a tiny bit under DVDs upconverted by a good DVD deck. The audio is analog Dolby ProLogic, of course, but these were really, really good DPL productions; some of he 5.1 surround perception on some of these analog surround audio productions, interpreted by the DSP in my Onkyo receiver, is better than many 5.1 discrete channel Dolby D or DTS productions. I'd hang onto my LDs.

But then again, we opted for a Blu-ray player and movies, an educated gamble that format would win. And then when HD DVD did indeed collapse, I went out and bought an HD DVD deck selling for $250 3 months before, and about $450 3 months before that, for $68. With two HD DVD movies thrown in, at the time each still retailing for $30 a piece at the time, just $10 off MSRP. Plus at least $20 worth of 3-meter HDMI cable, I came out like $12 AHEAD. I've been cleaning up on cut-rate HD DVD films, especially the exclusives which aren't yet scheduled for Blu-ray -- most of these HD DVDs are $5 or $10 LESS in stores or online than standard DVD versions of the same films. And it's not like they'll self-destruct in July or anything. Plus the HD DVD deck upconverts a little bit, but still noticeably, better than our premium Blu-ray unit.

I should add, I'm too picky to buy a lot of digital downloads, be they HD or SD (do they even offer HD for sale?) but for our kids... We have Netflix for renters-not-buyers, but kids' movies, the ability to buy older or new movies, my iTunes movie spending -- I've bought a bit of children's TV programming -- is about to multiply by about ten, up from all but zero. The Golden Compass was an immediate Blu-ray purchase, but the new Care Bears movie, iTunes purchase all the way, with an Apple TV, a Mac connected to an HDTV and between us all two iPhones, an iPod and a current iPod nano cable of outputting movies to a TV, this is a vast improvement. Pretty recently, my four-year-old son wanted Garfield, and I wasn't about to pay $4 to rent it for a day when I could buy the DVD he'd watch many, many times, for $14, so I ran out, tracked down and bought the DVD, took a couple hours all together; but I'd have bought the iTunes version and been done with it in 15 minutes, saved $4, if I could have at that time. Without evening think twice about it.

 

[BoulderBum]

One thing is certain, the 40GB model won't be around much longer. I know my iTunes library almost takes up that much space.

Actually, I would still prefer the lower GB model. Apple TV can stream from any computer that has iTunes open, and since I have my computer on all the time and it has a terabyte of space, it makes a lot of sense to just stream from my hard drive rather than copy every single bit of media I have to the Apple TV.

I actually think the best solution is to have an Apple TV with a paltry amount of onboard space, then a large, scalable NAS like the HP MediaSmart Server.

Right now there's a bug with that device that prevents you from safely adding extra disks (fix is due in June), but the concept is that you have a user friendly home appliance with several hot-swapple drive bays so that you can scale your storage space up to 4 TB+!

Apple probably won't have any sort of Apple TV with anywhere near that space or capability anytime soon (though I think Apple has a similar product that's not quite as robust as the MediaSmart).

In the end, for the same price or cheaper I'd rather buy the DVD and have a physical copy, that won't magically disappear if my hdd were to fail.

See, that's where a device like the above comes in handy, too. You can have automatic backup of all your files spread over multiple disks to safeguard your content.

Really, I think movies are going to be like music is now: I haven't bought a CD in probably close to a decade because digital downloads are so much cheaper and more convenient. You can take 20 movies and all your favorite TV shows with you on vacation (or whatever) with just an iPod in your pocket, but try doing that with DVD's!

 

[BoulderBum]

I know that the movie studios have varying tiers on release windows. Some titles have 1 - 1 1/2 months avail on Blu-Ray, DVD and now Purchase on apple tv/itunes as well as other outlets, prior to its avail as a ppv/vod.

this is unfortunately the way they are getting home video outlets to keep their margins, if they let people ppv a movie for $3-4 immediately, they would lose their highest end customers of discs/movies

See I was just thinking about it today, and you figure that if you purchase through the Apple TV, it's probably the exact same distribution cost as a rental: you either get a 4 GB (or whatever) file that deletes itself, or a 4 GB file that doesn't.

Not a bad move by the studios financially speaking, and one I can sort of live with, but it's a bit lame that Blockbuster et al get rentals so soon when they hold Apple TV back!