Why Apple Can't do to Video What it Did to Music

[Jeremy Charette]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.news.com/Why-Apple-cant-do-to-video-what-it-did-to-music/2010-1025_3-6221547.html?tag=nefd.top' target='_blank'>http://www.news.com/Why-Apple-cant-do-to-video-what-it-did-to-music/2010-1025_3-6221547.html?tag=nefd.top</a><br /><br /></div><i>"MP3 players, including the iPod, are valuable from the day you buy them because your entire CD collection provides immediate content to fill the device. The video hardware business is different. Unfortunately for consumers, the movie industry won't let you rip DVDs to iTunes, and therefore any one of the many devices Apple has recently added video to, including the iPhone, iPod Touch (essentially an iPhone for people with Verizon calling plans), iPod Nano video, and Apple TV. This means you can spend $299, as is the case with the Apple TV, and still not be able to transfer any of your existing video library to the device, forcing you to buy video from iTunes."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/video1.jpg" /> <br /><br />The record companies couldn't have seen the coming monopoly when the iPod hit the market half a decade ago. Lucky for the movie industry, they had the fortune of foresight, and headed it off at the pass. They've effectively prevented Apple from establishing a monopoly in the online video marketplace. Only problem is...the consumer suffers. What amazes me though is the way the laws are written, it's legal to rip a CD to your iPod, but not a DVD. Nevermind that there are dozens, if not hundreds of programs to do just that. Many of them free. Eventually some content provider is going to learn, and corner the market with inexpensive, univerally compatible, DRM-free content. I just hope it happens in my lifetime. :roll:

[Felix Torres]

Eventually some content provider is going to learn, and corner the market with inexpensive, univerally compatible, DRM-free content.

They have.
Its called TV. ;-)
Its not that hard to get a decent collection of digital video legally; any Media Center PC can be used to record good quality video off cable these days at pretty affordable prices. And if you don't want to bother with that, you can always hook up a standalone DVD-recorder to your cable box. Lots of people do this because it is exactly the way VCRs work; most cable DVR boxes even have settings to facilitate this. (Have you tried it? I've been capturing HD content off cable to DVD as high-data-rate SD and the stuff looks pretty good upscaled via 360. No DRM issues whatsoever so far.)

To me, the main real reason Apple has gotten so little traction in the video business is that the TV networks in particular have *always* been in retail distribution business, unlike the music studios who have generally been wholesalers (music clubs aside). So the networks are very much aware of the importance of controlling the access to the retail customer and they're not about to give it up to anybody, much less somebody with Apple's track record of bite-back.

A second reason is that the networks aren't really in the content business per-se; they are in the advertising business, primarily. Their business model is really the same as Google's; offer up content as a draw for eyeballs that you aggregate and sell to the advertisers. In fact, for years and years they were limited in the amount of their own content they could broadcast on their own networks by federal law. So the networks see Apple as a competitor. And while they're not adverse to using a competitor's distribution channel (Even today, it is not impossible to see, say, a Universal Show running on a non-NBC network.) they aren't going to go out of their way to help a competitor, especially now that DVD sales have provided them with a retail source of revenue from their libraries; syndication is no longer the last word in milking content. Or even the most profitable.

This is pretty much the same problem Sony faces in getting video downloads onto the PS3; their competitors are not going to do them any favors if they can help it. So if they're going to experiment (and an experiment is all it is for now) with online video sales and rentals via set-top boxes, XBOX is a safer bet for them than Apple or Sony since MS has been more accomodating, *asking* rather than telling the content providers how to price the content.

Long-term, the studios won't turn their backs on any revenue source so both Sony and Apple will get into the game, but it will be on the studios terms; and what the studios want is a balkanized, fractured marketplace where no single distributor can dictate terms to them. For now, that means helping Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Microsoft. Later, it'll mean helping Sony and Apple to balance out the market.

Those folks are very much aware of what happened (to them, for the most part) in the music business and they've learned their lessons.
They may not be the lessons we consumers wanted them to learn, but that's the way the game is playing out: Distribution channels matter and nobody is going to be allowed to dictate terms, whether it be pricing or DRM, to the content providers. They will experiment carefully until they find a satisfactory (to them) balance of market size, user convenience (or lack there-of) and profit.

[Jeremy Charette]

A second reason is that the networks aren't really in the content business per-se; they are in the advertising business, primarily.

In that sense, the TV business is much like the magazine business. Not surprisingly, my favorite TV shows are often on cable subscription channels, and my favorite magazines are the more expensive ones. I prefer unique over free. I suspect many consumers feel the same way.

I also offload tv shows from my Time Warner HD DVR to a standalone DVD recorder. And indeed, the HD feeds look pretty stellar when recorded at higher bit rates, such as 1 hour per single layer disc. I have more issues with the compression on Time Warner's end than I do with the DVD recorder though. :roll:

[Macguy59]

Half a decade? Might want to rethink that unless you meant the iTunes store rather than the iPod.

[lingenfr]

Maybe I am missing the point, but I rip my DVDs with Acidrip and encode using Floola or ThinLiquidFilm. Works great. There is another app called Handbrake that is supposed to do it all, I just have not been able to make it work.