Phil Schiller and iTunes Interview

[maxterpiece]

Apple Music Strategy

sort of off topic but maybe not... Schiller seemed to be concentrating on the idea that the iTunes music store would really push iPod sales. He may be right, but I think it's time for apple to release a cheap, simple mp3 player. I know it's been done before, but if I could buy a 128mb flash card player for $99, plug it into my computers and then just drag about 2 hours of audio on it, then go do my thing, I think that would be cool. The iPod is so expensive -- spending $300-$500 dollars on a player that is done for if it is lost or dropped, is only something that a serious audiophile would do. Obviously there're lots of companies that have small players like what I'm talking about, but if Apple released one, it would sync with itunes and the new iTunes store, leaving regular computer users a practical reason to buy music online and to buy a nifty little player that is smaller, lighter, MUCH cheaper and more durable than the iPod. The iPod seems like overkill for a lot of people -- you know what I'm saying? Not everyone cares to have every CD they own with them at all times. For a lot of people it's just aggravating to have to navigate the iPod (not that it's complicated... it just requires time and thought. Having a simple player, they could just skip to the track that they want and be happy, seems like a hole that apple should fill.... or else they are letting a lot of customers slip through the cracks.
Max

 

[Trimix]

To download movies would be nice but right now i would very much prefer if we had the opportunity to download 'books on tapes', i.e. books on my i-pod.
That would be very very nice and it would not require much setting up.

Regarding the argument that not everybody has broadband, why would that stop a company like Apple or M$ or anybody for that matter? It almost seems to me as if we want every possible gimmick, gadget and form of service but are not even prepared to pay for a measly ISDN or ADSL or cable-link to the house.
You want to take part - then do some upgrading and stop moaning. This will come, and I rather want it to be Apple reaping the laurels than any other company for that matter.

 

[mainstreetmark]

Trimix -

http://www.apple.com/ipod/ Click on "Audible.com" on far right of black bar under iPod pic.

And the whole Movie thing -
- a couple of previous posters are right. I've been downloading movies for a while now. I s-video them to my big screen digital TV. It works out very well, and on a good connection, I can actually get a nice quality movie in about 2.5hrs (1.5 gig mpg or something). You can fairly easily obtain near DVD quality Two Towers in the newsgroups (takes up 4 CDs!), and people do it all the time.

Mind you, this is all pirate and stuff, but you know what? I'm tired of paying 8.50 to go to the theater just to sit through SEVEN commercials for hair gel and stuff, and then having the kid next to me announce that Yoda's going to get into a lightsaber fight - a fact I did NOT know, due to carefully controlling Star Wars hype. I'm perfectly happy stealing from Hollywood, just as I was perfectly happy stealing from the record industry. Something reasonable came along for the record industry - they compromised a bit, the users compromised a bit - and would-be stealers are now legally downloading. If I could pay $2 to download a full quality version of Fight Club - I would (or, for that matter, the million indie films that never make it to my particular theater - like one called "Sunshine State" that I never got to see, even though it was filmed here in my city, mostly). They could lock it up so that it could only be played on 2 macs and 1 burn or whatever, but that's fine with me. If the restrictions are reasonable, I'm willing to flex a bit. Would I pay $20 to watch a new release? Of course I would! Right now, I'd already be having my X-Men party with 20 people over all gathered around my big screen, instead of trolling around IRC waiting for a bot to start sending it to me.

Have I bought anything through iTunes? Well, no.. the stuff I like to listen to is barely obtainable in Kazaa. Hopefully, Apple will make provisions for the myriad of indie labels out there to sell through Apple. It seems inevitable....

(and, for what it's worth, it appears as though .99/song is not a fixed price. I would imagine those numbers would begin to fluctuate a bit over time. They should make it demand-based, so that less popular songs are nearly free. let the Market set the price.)

 

[madamimadam]

iTunes and Movies?

Did anyone else notice that the question asked was completely flawed. Why would you download movies via iTunes? Surely, if Apple did have plans to move into the movie market they would use a different program.

So, will people be able to download movies from iTunes... well... NO... he was not lying.

 

[Squire]

...and, for what it's worth, it appears as though .99/song is not a fixed price. I would imagine those numbers would begin to fluctuate a bit over time. They should make it demand-based, so that less popular songs are nearly free. let the Market set the price.

I totally agree with the prices. What's the sense of putting "$0.99" on the screen 200,000 times?

Squire

 

[Squire]

Re: iTunes and Movies?

Originally posted by madamimadam
Did anyone else notice that the question asked was completely flawed. Why would you download movies via iTunes? Surely, if Apple did have plans to move into the movie market they would use a different program.

So, will people be able to download movies from iTunes... well... NO... he was not lying.

Enter the "iMovie Video Store."

Squire

 

[Trimix]

regarding the flexible pricing (letting the market decide)
why would I buy a song which in my mind is crap, even if it costs only half or almost nothing ?
we have already the flexibility to pick and choose - so why now a pricing fixed to the number of downloads ? what does the artist gain ?
if we want to be philospohical about it, then in the long run, artists would stop experimenting and just look at the number of downloads on any given system and imitate the songs ad infinitum...
we, as the consumers would be exposed to even more of the same...
just think of 50 plastic boygroups on offer all with a similar tune -
in my book, i am happy if they experiment, even if they need to hide their experiments on track 11 - but maybe I am blue-eyed

 

[Vroem]

Originally posted by iSmell
I'm pretty sure that MPEG 4 supports multichannel sound and aac is high quality, so I don't think this will be a problem. DivX may not have surround sound, but they won't be selling DivX movies anyway.

There is no profile for audio with more than 2 channels in the MPEG-4 standard. Of course you can put any stream you want in the MPEG-4 container, but then it would not be ISO anymore. (What where you saying about divx? It's a VIDEO profile, it has nothing to do with audio.)

 

[mainstreetmark]

if we want to be philospohical about it, then in the long run, artists would stop experimenting and just look at the number of downloads on any given system and imitate the songs ad infinitum...
we, as the consumers would be exposed to even more of the same...
just think of 50 plastic boygroups on offer all with a similar tune -
in my book, i am happy if they experiment, even if they need to hide their experiments on track 11 - but maybe I am blue-eyed [/B]

That's actually a pretty good point, but I would also tend to think that if everything started to sound the same, people would quit downloading it. We do get that 30 sec preview.

If, however, you like the preview of some song you never heard of, and the cost is only like .40, you might be tempted to download it more, which, I think, might actually promote diversity.

After all - all artists already know what songs sell. We have Clear Channel to thank for that.

 

[Winston Smith]

Originally posted by rdas7
How many people are going to download graphics?

How many people are going to download applications

How many people are going to download audio?!

Who is EVER going to need any more than 400k of storage space on a floppy?

With processor speeds increasing and the cost of storage decreasing even faster (Wired Article:
Shifting Into Overdrive) it's not long before we're loading up our iPods with Terabytes of data and our P800s with a "measly" 1GB Memory Stick.

Back in the day, the jump from a 1200 to a 9600 baud modem was an amazing leap. At 28.8k we thought things wouldn't get any faster (notice how ZIPPY those pages are loading?).

True 56k is just about the cap for the current system, but 3G wireless gives a *theoretical* throughput of around 320kbps through the air, and certainly with 802.11a/g we're looking at megabits per second... who's to say these won't eclipse copper wire broadband/cable, etc. in the future?

If history is anything to go by, our kids will laugh at us when we tell them that we had to physically go to Blockbuster to rent movies, and how we felt "holding" our first compact disc. They will look at us and say, "Why didn't you just download it?" from behind their contact-lense monitors and dual-button Apple mice.

Great post

1st, despite Arn's point that Phil Schiller denied it, if Apple isn't beginning to work on movie, tv etc downloading then the Jobs reality distortion field has finally disappeared. That would never happen and besides Jobs is already a respected figure in the movie industry with Pixar so he already has a leg up.

2nd, Early indications are that iTMS is a huge success (in America at least), what business do you know of that doesn't aim to expand, improve, or revolutionise its great successes except of course names we fondly remember.

3rd, Rumours of the communication device = something to connect your Mac to your other multimedia devices. Not very Apple when its just iTunes to your HiFi, but the whole iLife suite to your Hifi, HDTV, Mobile Phone, contact lens monitor etc - VERY Apple and not hard to do now.

Broadband adoption will happen when it HAS to happen, as a Mac that can run OS X comfortably largely has.
Of course I'll struggle to backup my Movie downloads to the floppy I had to have when I bought my Bondi Blue iMac, but then I've never really used that floppy. Now I don't use the Modem thats still preinstalled in Macs.

A little imagination is all we need and Dolby 5.1, DTS and THX support.........

 

[GregA]

Originally posted by Trimix
To download movies would be nice but right now i would very much prefer if we had the opportunity to download 'books on tapes', i.e. books on my i-pod.
That would be very very nice and it would not require much setting up.

Interesting.

Make the iPod screen a bit larger... colour too (pictures in your books?). Then download the newspaper before catching the train to work. Listen to music while reading the news (or download a series of websites to read?)

I know... an old idea... that never took off.

Come to think of it, you could probably watch music video clips on one too?

 

[GregA]

Re: Movies

Originally posted by Jimmni
As far as I can see, the problem with movie downloads <snip> would be if I had to watch the film on my computer. My computer isn't in front of my couch <snip> This isn't actually that big of a problem though, because with DVD writers becoming more common, and DVD players in a good proportion of homes, Apple wouldn't be that hard pressed to make a program to burn DVDs.

Hi Jimmni,

Surely streaming the video to your TV would be much better. The technology to convert a digital video to TV is pretty standard now - DVD, Digital Video cameras, Satellite TV decoders, Set top boxes.... so a little Apple decoder box maybe?

Either it would just decode movies, or maybe be a whole remote Mac screen. But not burning a DVD so you can walk it into the next room (unless you mean as an archive....!)

Greg
(ps. I'd like to play my music through my stereo in the next room!)

 

[Flowbee]

If movies come into this equation, then a TV interface will have to be in place. I'm happy having my music on my computer, but I'll never watch video on it.

 

[Jimmni]

Re: Re: Movies

Originally posted by GregAussie

Surely streaming the video to your TV would be much better. The technology to convert a digital video to TV is pretty standard now - DVD, Digital Video cameras, Satellite TV decoders, Set top boxes.... so a little Apple decoder box maybe?

Either it would just decode movies, or maybe be a whole remote Mac screen. But not burning a DVD so you can walk it into the next room (unless you mean as an archive....!)

The problem with what you suggest is that I'm on a serious budget. I love films, and most of the money I spend gets spent on watching or buying films. But I'm a student, and had to save up to get my £60 DVD player. I just couldn't justify buying new hardware for film watching for a good few years. If the box was £40 and films were £2.50 or less, released alongside or before rental stores, I might get tempted. But we all know Apple. The box would be £150. I just couldn't buy that sort of thing. And I'm in a shared house, with a shared connection. What if I'm streaming a film and one of my housemates starts a heavy download? I just don't like the idea of streaming a film at all. I like archiving my films too, as you say. I'd happily pay £8-10 for a DVDr that I could burn myself. I'd be more likely to plump for a DVD writer to burn films I could play at my friends' houses than for a set top box that relied on being at my house, and relied on me having broadband at the time.

- Jimmni

 

[iJon]

Originally posted by mgescuro
Then they'd have to partner with Earthlink to bring broadband to Mac users.

what do you mean bring broadband to mac users. im almost positive they have broadband, because i am switching to them from sbc. if you are talking about satellite internet then you are right, but there are easy solutions to getting satellte internet on macs.

iJon