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September 12, 2006

itunes_store

Surprise! Apple adds movies to iTunes Musi-er, iTunes Store

Posted Sep. 12, ’06, 10:52 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | iTunes » iTunes Store

Steve and JohnnyWell, yes, we all knew it was coming. This is perhaps the least surprising announcement of the year, Apple-wise, but I’m kind of glad it’s out there. Apple’s added feature films to the iTunes Store, which has also, apparently, finally dropped the “Music” moniker.

As predicted earlier in the week, the only studio onboard at the moment is Disney. New movies will go for $14.99 with most of the catalog going for $9.99. But wait! If you pre-order or buy within the first week of a new release, it’ll only cost you $12.99. Woo hoo.

There are 75 films up now, all from Disney and its subsidiaries (Miramax, Touchstone, Pixar, etc). The two top grossing movies of the year, Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 are both available for pre-order. Movies are in 640x480 resolution (blech) although Jobs claims the audio is Dolby Surround Sound quality (hmm). You won’t be able to burn the movies to disc (thumbs down) but you can share them among authorized computers.

The iTunes software will let you watch a movie as you’re downloading, presuming of course, that you have 5-6Mbps connection that’ll support that, and you can download multiple movies at once, which will be controlled by iTunes’s new Download Manager. Over a 5Mbps connection, download time for a full-length movie (1.5 hours? 2 hours?) is supposedly 30 minutes. I will be fascinated to know what the technology behind this is, as will Derik, I know.

Jobs added that they hoped to take movie downloads international sometime next year.

[Picture via Engadget]


1 Comments

Eddie Hargreaves said:

"Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 are both available"

Really? Where? I found that you can pre-order Cars, but nothing about Pirates 2.

September 12, 2006 2:23 PM

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