Comments on: Forrester’s James McQuivey Announces the Death of iTunes, Again

By: NBC returns to iTunes for 65 million viewers and HD action — RoughlyDrafted Magazine

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 05:16:46 +0000

[...] up roughly 40% of all video downloads on iTunes. Critics complained that NBC’s pullout would decimate iTunes’ attempts to break into TV [...]

By: rahlgren

rahlgren — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:23:47 +0000

So does Forrester do research for the White House? Sounds like the same kind of misinformation and disconnect that comes out of that place.

By: How Apple Could Deliver Workable iTunes Rentals — RoughlyDrafted Magazine

How Apple Could Deliver Workable iTunes Rentals — RoughlyDrafted Magazine — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:28:39 +0000

[...] ← Forrester’s James McQuivey Announces the Death of iTunes, Again [...]

By: nat

nat — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:40:53 +0000

Thanks for the clarification on video prices thgd and shaun.

By: thgd

thgd — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:52:24 +0000

@Nat: This from an “ars technica” story on September 12, 2006 which is the day movies came to the iTunes store.

…”Apple has apparently listened to the movie studios, and has adopted a pricing strategy to promote new releases. While new videos will sell for $14.99, studios have the option of offering pre-orders for $12.99, and this special introductory pricing will also be good for the first week that a video is released. Older titles will be sold at $9.99. “

By: nextcube

nextcube — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:01:08 +0000

bliiyc: the video encoders like H.264 and xvid have a huge number of “knobs” the user can turn – video bitrate, video resolution, video framerate, audio codec, audio sampling frequency, audio bitrate, motion compensation, on and on. You can’t just assume that two files are equivalent just because they’re “rips” of the same movie. ITMS uses a higher video resolution and a higher bitrate for its movie download than most of the movie “rips” I’ve seen on the P2P networks, so of course its files are bigger. If you actually compare encoding head-to-head, H.264 gives you a smaller file for equivalent video quality.

By: Albert

Albert — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:48:40 +0000

Guys, here’s an engadget story regarding the Nokia and so called free music.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/05/nokias-free-comes-with-music-and-drm-and-hidden-fees/

By: Tilneys

Tilneys — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:06:52 +0000

@Gus2000 The nokia/universal “free” music solution is a complete and utter nonsense. How much in data charges will it take to download one song? And are you going to waste time on it knowing it goes up in smoke in 12 months? It smacks of desperation to me.

By: billyc

billyc — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:30:39 +0000

@danieleran Thanks for your reply!In my opinion, it is due to the popularity of piratied mp3 in music, the ITunes and IPods combination fullfilled consumers’ portability wish and became a success. In terms of video, H.263 is much more popular than H.264 on the Internet because two reasons: 1.The file size for the same quality video is smaller (read the artical “Why low def is the new HD” from this site). Have you tried to purchase a movie via ITunes? Have you look at the size of the movie and how long it takes to download via a normal 6MB broadband? The file size for 640×480 H.264 movie, it is easily over 2GB. For the same resolution H.263, it is around 700MB. You can see what difference it will make in terms of download time and storage. 2.Easily find pirated contents on the P2P. Once again, it was people who had pirated or ripped mp3 looking for a easy portable solution made ITunes and IPods a success, not the other way around. That is why it is only 20% music on IPods is purchased via ITunes. For the same reason, video on IPods is not as polular as the music, becauses it is not playing pirated or ripped H.263 format videos. Not untill the chipset on IPod plays both H.263 and H.264 like it plays mp3 and AAC, you will not see a great demand from users for video on IPod. Today, IPods contain a dominant percentage of music downloaded legally or illegally. It is not the same story for IPods if we talk about the videos.

By: danieleran

danieleran — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:10:22 +0000

@ billyc: The problem with xvid/DivX (H.263) is that there are lots of weird variations, it’s based on the archaic AVI format, and its overwhelmingly pirated. AVC/H.264 is more efficient and it’s easier for Apple to support as a standard format.

Of course, you can add xvid/DivX codecs to QuickTime and play back your DivX content in iTunes. You can even (with some effort) install those codecs on Apple TV. The problem is that you can’t install codecs on the iPod, because it doesn’t play video using QuickTime, but rather plays back video using decoding hardware.

That’s far more efficient, resulting in better playback at lower battery use. It’s also possible to use QuickTime to transcode DivX to H.264 for playback on iPods.

The short answer would have been: Apple can’t add DivX support to the iPod, but it doesn’t need to.