Amid growing concerns over digital piracy, Hollywood studios are pressing for major changes to the iTunes platform.
In the latest after to avoid the well publicized failures of the music industry, Hollywood studios want Apple to introduce a “new model” for movie content delivery according to one studio exec.
Following on the heels of yesterdays announced partnership with BitTorrent Inc., the studios, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros, are still in talks with Apple to allow for the digital distribution of their films on iTunes.
The only thing is however, studios are tremendously concerned about aiding and abetting digital piracy, which allegedly costs them $3.2 billion USD in lost revenues each year.
Hollywood studios want Apple to limit the number of iPods that can be used for each computer to four or five at the most so that it will supposedly inhibit the “professional” movie pirates out there.
“The question is whether Apple is willing to be a little compliant in order to move the movie business more rapidly into digital distribution,” according to a studio exec..
But, this is quite different from the way that music downloads are handled on iPods, and could spell real trouble for users if the RIAA presses for similar changes to iTunes, which is inevitable if the studios are successful in their demands.
Earlier this year Walt Disney studios struck a deal with Apple to provide movie and TV content for digital download on iTunes without concern for piracy or the limiting of connectable iPods per each PC, so it makes one wonder why the other studios would have any more fears or concerns than Disney had.
Disney has sold more than 500,000 movies on iTunes so far this year, which has taken place amid slowing global DVD sales and therefore no doubt helped maintain the company’s bottom line.
To add fuel to the fire, the retailers Target and Wal-Mart have written letters to Disney complaining that iTunes downloads threaten their DVD sales and demand a “level playing field.”
The level playing field they want is to make the price for a digital download the same as that of a DVD. This of course ignores all the decreased distribution costs and turns away many people because of the inflated price, in effect undermining the whole purpose of digital downloads in the first place which is to combat piracy.
What will happen is anybody’s guess but, if I know one thing about Apple it’s that Steve Jobs is no pushover, and for them to get their way means they’ll have to make a more convincing argument. With DVD sales slowing and piracy on the rise, they’d better get their priorities straight and realize that some revenue is better than none at all.
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I haven’t heard about any problems with Disney’s movie’s being distributed on iTunes getting illegally copied or whatever.
Who would even waste their time to remove copy protection from crappy quality video like those from Apple.
People are crazy for buying low-quality DRM-infected garbage like that in the first place!
Digital distribution makes content cheap. Studios need high prices to produce and pay artists who work for the corporation and make a profit.
The problem is no one wants to pay any money for content if it is in digital form. Corporations will make content for other reasons the content will be free and only the best content will have an audience. For example. an animation company would create a TV show and distribute it for free to sell t-shirts of animated actors or stuffed animals for sale. Another example would be an exercise equipment comany creating a fitness video distributed free on the net using only equipment that they are currently selling.
The days of over-the-air broadcast are over. DRM will never work. Good content is viral.
The movie studios complain too much they need to just get with the times instead suing everyone and crying about it.
its funny to me how they even bother to put DRM in iTunes stuff. if someone is going to steal music they would do it over a normal P2P network. its not like copying an iTunes track is any less illegal than using P2P.
and Walmart can suckit