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iTunes Music Store Sells Videos
Posted by
timothy
on Mon May 09, 2005 10:55 PM
from the now-the-world-is-finished dept.
from the now-the-world-is-finished dept.
bonch writes "With the recent release of iTunes 4.8 and its ability to manage and play videos, several users are discovering that iTunes is now selling videos through the online store. One example is the 'Feel Good Inc.' single used in the recent rollerskating iPod ad. The videos are provided in DRM-less .mp4 format encoded in 3ivx D4 4.5 and are available with purchase of the album."
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Need a preview (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Need a preview (Score:5, Funny)
They are music videos. You should know what they are already: a bunch of musicians prancing/grimacing/pouting while the camera quickly pans and zooms. Depending on the class of music, attractive people as eye candy is the norm. Some classes of music also include dark lighting and spooky imagery. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the video is designed to make the music seem better and more commercially appealing.
Parent
Re:Need a preview (Score:5, Funny)
Two girls.
Good-looking.
In their late teens.
Dressed in short-skirted school uniforms.
Kissing.
Each other.
In the rain.
That, my friend is ART!
There might have been a song playing in the background, I don't really remember.
Parent
Re:Need a preview (Score:3, Informative)
and they weren't in their late teens,
fifteen and fourteen when they made the video.
pervert...
(I liked them too, I have family in eastern europe, and a large group of lithuanian friends, I've heard a lot of it in russian before they had english songs)
Re:Need a preview (Score:5, Funny)
It's only art if it's either in black and white or has subtitles... otherwise it's porn
Anyway, why would it need music with all of the other stimulants that it contains?
Parent
Re:Need a preview (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
The quality of iTMS Movies (Score:5, Funny)
However this could be balanced out with some porn so.... Apple, be wise.
The Year of HD, coming soon! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure this is just a toe in the water for Apple to start offering movies and other on-demand video with ITMS. Anyone who's been watching how movie trailers are hosted by Apple, how iTunes interfaces with HQ trailers, how Jobs has been talking of late, and how ITMS has been dabbling in video can't help but see the writing on the wall. Apple wants to be your one-stop media shop, not just the place where you buy songs or little music players. They're looking to marginalize entire swaths of the old regime in one fell swoop, and for my part, I'm rather looking forward to the shake-up.
Yes, a lot of the preceding has been hinted at by Cringely [pbs.org], there's nothing wrong with agreeing with someone else's take on things. :)
HD . . . or maybe not (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Year of HD, coming soon! (Score:4, Interesting)
Been out since August of last year (if not earlier).
https://secure1.nexternal.com/shared/StoreFront/d
And when you've bought it, head over to http://www.misticriver.net/ [misticriver.net] to figure out how to use it.
iRiver = iPod Killer.
Parent
Re:The Year of HD, coming soon! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The Year of HD, coming soon! (Score:5, Insightful)
And when you've bought it, head over to http://www.misticriver.net/ [misticriver.net] to figure out how to use it.
is why this:
iRiver = iPod Killer.
Will never be true
Parent
FLAC or Apple Lossless first! (Score:5, Interesting)
SP
Re:FLAC or Apple Lossless first! (Score:5, Insightful)
As it stands now, if you burn your 128k AAC purchase from iTMS to a CD and re-rip the result to strip off the FairPlay DRM in an Apple-sanctioned manner, you've either a) lost some quality along the way by using another lossy format to re-encode, or b) grossly oversized the file by using Apple Lossless to re-encode the previously lossy material. But if they offer lossless tunes for download, then that same process will result in a perfect DRM-less copy (unless of course faulty hardware or something similar caused a bit or two to get lost along the way).
They'd never be able to sell the record companies on that one. So, unfortunately, I doubt we'll ever see lossless downloads from iTMS unless they prevented them from ever being burned to CD (in which case a lot of the desirability flies right out the window).
-Frank
Parent
New iPod (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, so (Score:3, Insightful)
Building a device perfectly capable of playing video and using it to display photos is insanity.
Is there a stevenote at the WWDC this year? Do you think maybe they'll announce a video iPod then?
Also: if the videos are un-DRMed mp4, does this mean they could be loaded onto a PSP or Nintendo DS play-yan?
Re:Okay, so (Score:5, Insightful)
Watching video on a 2 inch screen is insanity. No. It's just completely fucking stupid.
Parent
Testbed for OTHER non-drm video (Score:5, Insightful)
iPorn (Score:3, Funny)
Old Skool (Score:3, Funny)
Not 3ivx (Score:5, Informative)
Is Mac Mini a stealth PVR/movie on demand device? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've wondered since shortly after the mini was released if it wasn't a PVR in disguise. Virtually every plasma and LCD television sold today features a DVI connector... just like the Mac Mini. Combine that with Apple's excellent streaming technology and the established ITMS distribution channel, and Jobs might be on to something (again).
With a big external firewire drive the mini could make Apple the first serious contender to mass-market full-length HDTV content over IP.
Re:Is Mac Mini a stealth PVR/movie on demand devic (Score:3, Interesting)
To turn a mac mini into a decent PVR, you would need an external encoder, external storage, an IR receiver + remote, and good software to manage it all. At that point, you're talking about a hell of a lot more then the $499 sticker price, and ta
Re:Is Mac Mini a stealth PVR/movie on demand devic (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like EVERY GRAPHICS CARD IN THE PAST 5 YEARS. Give me a break.
Excellent? Really? Quicktime streaming isn't any better than any other streaming technology I've seen. Besides, it's not as if Apple's streaming server is some secret technology that only they happen to have access to (as iTunes is), absolutely anyone else could stream media using the exact same protocols and even the exact same software.
No it couldn't. The Mac Mini isn't really powerful enough to playback HDTV video in realtime on it's CPU, and it only has hardware support for MPEG-2 playback. Nobody is going to want to download 30+GBs of MPEG-2 video just to watch a 30-minute video (minus commercials). So, any HDTV service would use a more advanced codec such as MPEG-4 AVC (H.264)/VP6/etc., which the Mac Mini doesn't have the power to playback.
Besides, if the Mac Mini was intended as an HDTV PVR, it would have come with a 3.5" HDD that could hold 300GBs, not a tiny drive, requiring numerous external expansion devices. Remember the iMac? Jobs would simply never put out a device that needs all sorts of add-on hardware.
Parent
Re:Is Mac Mini a stealth PVR/movie on demand devic (Score:3, Insightful)
How come I don't see the videos? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm guessing Apple only validates new purchases, eh? Hmm. Anyone else had this experience?
Video in iTunes? (Score:4, Informative)
Playing music videos in iTunes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Link from front page didnt work :) (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Link from front page didnt work :) (Score:3, Funny)
Re:but still no... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only vaporware if they said it was coming. I try to keep up on Apple news, but I don't remember Apple ever promising that iTunes was coming to Australia, so therefore they owe you nothing. I've heard that an actor and a musician said it was coming, but not Apple. If they made that promise, please post the link. I'd love to get more Chumbawumba songs. (No, really, I would.)
Parent
Re:but still no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:but still no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How long until feature films... (Score:3, Interesting)
And for on the go, something tells me that iPod Photo [apple.com] is about to get a firmware upgrade...
Re:How long until feature films... (Score:3, Informative)
The only challenge is the dedicated H.264 decoder hardware. Right now, it takes a souped-up Power Mac G5 to decode 1080p in real time. That's gonna be fixed in hardware, of course.
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody's wrong about the video iPod thing. A video iPod would be a dumb idea for lots of reasons, some technical, some psychological. If you want to know where we're going with video playback, look not to the iPod but to its considerably less famous little brother, AirPort Express.
(Addendum: I see now that at least a couple of commenters have figured this out already. Good for them. You all suck for stealing my surprise. One of them even nailed the big challenge, still to date unsolved, right on the head. I wonder if you guys will know it when you see it?)
Yes, of course we're going to be selling new types of content via the iTunes distribution model. It may or may not happen through the "iTunes" name. On the one hand, selling movies and TV shows through a store called "iTunes" makes no sense. On the other, iTunes has HUGE brand recognition right now. It's a marketing decision.
What exactly we offer depends on whose content you're talking about. Some content will be provided to us in 720-by-486 anamorphic, which we'll encode in H.264 at between 1 and 2 megabits. (Did you notice that QuickTime 7 has additional support for anamorphic video? I knew you would.) Other content will come in at HD, and for the time being we'll scale that down to half-HD at 2 Mbps. Doing full 1080/24p at 8 Mbps just isn't practical right now given that even the fastest cable modems in the US top out at 4 Mbps; in order to get real-time streaming of full-HD content, you'd need one of those new-fangled fiber optic Internet services that the telcos are starting to roll out. That's too forward-thinking for phase one. But we can do 2 Mbps now to the same customers we're shipping iTunes songs to.
Pricing, terms and dates will be totally up in the air until five minutes before we announce, and maybe even after that. Remember the Australian store? We had to put that roll-out on indefinite hiatus when The Label That Shall Not Be Named pulled out. All of this depends on the content-providers. Yes, somebody out there is going to say "Pixar." To that person I whisper the name "Disney" and the phrase "subsidiary rights." It's not as simple as you think.
Basically what stands between us and roll-out today is 10% technological and 90% business. It strikes me as kinda funny that some people look only at the technology part of our operations for clues as to future directions. Yes, we shipped iTunes 4.8 with video playback. Whoopty-do. iTunes is built on QuickTime. Adding video support was so incredibly trivial, you wouldn't believe it. It's a tiny thing. What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property. So when we go to (say) Disney and ask them to let us distribute their unimaginably valuable IP over the Internet, we're going to have a little bit more credibility than whatever copycat tries to come along behind us (cough*Napster*cough, cough*Walmart*cough).
These are the things you guys need to be paying attention to. Not the product releases. The lawsuits. That's where you'll find the clues.
Parent
Re:Does the MacMini figure into this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mac mini is meant to be a computer, nothing more. It was designed to be an inexpensive entry to the Mac product line for people who already own PCs and want to step up to something better. It doesn't have anything like the CPU power required for HD playback. You might be able to squeeze 4 Mbps out of it, maybe, if you hold your mouth just right and you're willing to live with some dropped frames. But anything more is not going to be an option this year, and maybe not next either.
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.
(How can we do photos, then? Easy. Photos are even smaller than songs. And unlike video, people often do want to carry photos around with them. Keep reading.)
Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things: Ride on the train, exercise, shop. People like to multi-task with their music.
Video, whether short-form like TV or long-form like movies, isn't like that. Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over. That's a totally different interaction model than music.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
Parent
Re:You are him! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who is this guy? ASOT unmasked! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Who is this guy? ASOT unmasked! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither Apple's management nor Apple's shareholders give a shit about what the "alpha geeks" think.
I know, I know. It's harsh. But it's absolutely true. See, the "alpha geeks" are not our market. We don't sell to them. The "alpha geeks" are defined by one key characteristic: they're irrational. Now, I'm not trying to insult you. I mean it literally. Geeks are not rational. They base their purchasing decisions on things that, from a rational point of view, just don't make any sense. Things like politics, lack "openness," like "customizability." Things that just don't add up in the cost-benefit analysis.
That's fine. That's totally legitimate. But it's not our business.
We sell products to people who want them to work. We don't sell products to people who want to take them apart. There are other companies that do that. We don't seek to dominate them or to put them out of business. We don't see them as competition at all, because the kinds of people who buy our products would never buy a motherboard. They'd never buy Linux. Never in a million years.
Is there some overlap? Sure. We love the fact that some prominent hard-core geeks use Macs. But we're not going to abandon our business plan to woo them. We're not going to turn our backs on the vast and untapped market for next-generation content delivery services, a market which we basically created, in order to please some Internet message board guys.
Again, I'm sorry for sounding so harsh here. I don't mean to be rude. I'm just not going to sugar-coat it for you. You do your thing, whatever makes you happy. We'll do ours.
Parent
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not famous or anything, but I've got a Mac and a Linux PC sitting on my desk right now. Since I got the Mac a year and a half ago, I've been raving about it to everyone I know. I'm personally responsible for converting at least one of my friends; he's got a Powerbook and a Mac Mini now, as well as an iPod. My girlfriend has an iPod, too. My dad's on the verge of replacing his PC with an iMac. So, my opinio
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the Geek Vanguard is not Apple's market, why are you guys so insistent about articulating Apple's positions to them? Obviously the perceptions of this community is important to Apple's advocates or we wouldn't see you here.
Parent
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:5, Informative)
You're confusing QuickTime with QuickTime-based applications. In QuickTime 7 we added new attributes that tell QuickTime applications to take a movie with native size X by Y and play it back at size A by B. But the applications have to set that attribute.
besides, why the fuck would you offer online movie downloads as anamorphic video?
Because that's what the video is. Standard-def TV masters are stored on videotape in anamorphic format. When they're played back on a widescreen set, they're stretched out to about 850 by 480. That's how widescreen SD works.
It makes no sense to stretch content before encoding it; at that point, you're just compressing noise. It only makes sense to encode it in the native format, 720 by 480, and then stretch it during playback. That's how you get the highest picture quality out of widescreen SD content.
24p describes how cameras like the dvx-100 record video--24 frames per second, progressive scan. not necessarily HD (the dvx-100 shoots straight DV).
I don't understand this comment at all. When I said "1080/24p," maybe I should have been more specific. I was referring to video in the 1920-by-1080 format playing back at 24 frames per second. That's what the vast majority of scripted TV drama is, as well as high-def movie transfers. When that TV goes out over the air, it's converted through a process called "pulldown" to 60i, sixty fields per second interlaced. But that's for broadcast. We obviously won't want to do that, because again, we'd just be compressing noise. If 3:2 is required, we'll add it during playback just like DVD players do.
jvc's HD cameras record 30 progressive frames at 720p, the other HD spec.
Actually, 720p is usually shot sixty frames per second, not thirty. That's why it's so great for sports.
But the vast majority of scripted content is still shot at 24 frames per second, either on film or in 1080/24p. Motion at 24 frames per second has a very distinctive look, totally different from what we're used to seeing on video. Because people are used to seeing 24-frames-per-second content, giving them 60i or 60p is a distraction. Plus it's more expensive, because storing 30 interlaced frames or 60 progressive frames per second obviously takes more disk space than 24 frames per second.
We're going to deliver whatever the master format is. If that's 24p, then we'll deliver 24p. If it's native 60i (like shot in 60i, not interlaced from 24p source), then we'll deliver 60i. QuickTime doesn't care. If adjustments need to be made between the movie on disk and the screen, like adding 3:2 pulldown for display on an interlaced-scan television, then we'll add it at the end, not at the beginning.
Parent
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:5, Informative)
Idiot. Quicktime attrs are set when the movie is written. The encoding app has to set the attr. Like Final Cut or iMove, the examples you named.
they're stored on videotape, which, the last time i checked, was an analog medium that had a fixed aspect ratio.
Check again. Videotape hasn't been analog for YEARS. Digital Betacam is by far the most popular standard def format and has been for a decade now. And no, it doesn't have a fixed aspect ratio. It holds either 4:3 or 16:9 anamorphic.
It's funny how you accuse As Seen for having his facts wrong when you clearly don't know the first thing yoruself.
besides, i don't really remember seeing a whole lot of standard-def tv in widescreen.
Everything that's shown in HD is shot in widescreen, whether it's center-cropped to 4:3 or shown letterboxed. Some of the prominent shows that are shown letterboxed include "Enterprise," "ER" and "Mythbusters."
so "the majority of scripted dramas" are not 1080/24p.
Do you understand the difference between how it's shot and how it's transmitted? Everything that's not live is shot 1080/24p or film @ 24p, then CONVERTED to 1080i or 720p for broadcast. Since AAPL is going to take the broadcast part out, there's no need to convert.
why would abc and fox shoot at 1080 when they're going to to have to convert and broadcast at 720?
Because studio equipment is all 1080. Besides, most of ABC's stuff is shot on either Super 35 or Super 16 and telecined anyway.
it took a very large update to final cut pro to support the 3:2 pull down from a 24p camera
A 24p camera doesn't insert pulldown, idiot. Pulldown is only present at 30 fps.
you think vhs really handled 24fps?
WTF? VHS was an ancient analog format that stored 30i WITH PULLDOWN. Your an idiot.
but leaves the vtr end at 60i
That's just wrong. The HDW-F500 records EVERYTHING at 24p then adds pulldown on playback.
Dude, you need to get off your high horse. You're just plain wrong.
Parent
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:3, Funny)
that's all.
Re:Where's As Seen On TV when we need him???? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:support for burning dvds? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Gonna need a bigger iPod (Score:3, Funny)
Now that's a big iPod!
Too bad it's so crash-prone.