When the Steve announced the iTunes Movie Rentals service at MacWorld, he promised that it would offer at least 1,000 movie rentals by the end of February… and, within those 1,000 rentals, at least 100 of them would be HD rentals. Well, February has come and gone, and those goals were not met.
Using the Apple TV to count HD rentals, MacWorld’s Christopher Breen found a total of 91 HD titles (100 was the target). Another disappointing fact is that not all of these 91 HD titles feature Dolby Digital 5.1… a feature Apple had also promised.
For the total number of rentals available, things get worse. The Apple TV movies section reported a total of 351 movies for rent according to Christopher. 378 were available in the ‘all movies’ section, and only 399 when using ‘power search’. Looks like they have a very long way to go to meet the targets they set out and promised back in January at MacWorld!
One can only suspect that the studios are to blame for the delays on new titles and releases. Licensing issues with the studios could be a problem, and I would not be surprised if one or more studios are delaying the process. No matter which way you slice it, Apple might have mis-judged how compliant and easy it would be to work with the studios on this one. Once all the ‘kinks’ are worked out I’m sure we’ll see the number of movie rentals skyrocket.. but until then… Apple is left with an over promised, and under delivered iTunes Movie Rental Store.
[via arstechnica]
written by Mr. Mayor \\ tags: Apple TV, iTunes Movie Rentals
March 5th, 2008 at 8:14 am
Although I agree the root cause of the movies not being available yet on iTunes for rental/download lies with the studios. However, I disagree that the reason Apple has not met its targets are to be placed on the Studios. If Steve chose to claim that by the end of February we’d have X amount of rentals, and Y of those are HD, its up to Steve/Apple to make sure that was feasible. If (and the key here is if b/c these are all assumptions), the deals were not ironed out, then the blame on making the claim and not reaching the goal lies on Steve.
Apple is crossing into territories that are not 100% under the jurisdiction of Steve, as such, Steve has to learn to play well with others and work well in group situations. Over time I’m sure we’ll see videos take the same turn music did, but the key here is over time. We’re dealing with organizations that have done things a certain way for quite awhile. Expecting them to turn to a much more favorable method of content delivery will take time, not “just because Steve says so”.