I wrote a comment on another story here recently which went: “It’s the studios and labels who carved up the IP world into regions long ago, and it is they who sustain it.”

If there’s one thing worse than slow download speeds it is indeed the absence of content that you describe. The UK iTunes Store is a middle ground in that regard, thanks to the country’s traditional rank of a mid-sized market.

I’ve long imported DVD’s from America for price and availability reasons (Japanese anime especially) but that’s something you can’t do with digital downloads. Amazon etc. don’t really care where you are, so long as you pay for delivery.

If only I had a US billing address, I could probably access content quicker than most Americans!

Presumably Apple are in talks for content in every market they have an iTunes store … and the ones they are planning next. But you have to expect them to concentrate on their home market first of course, and to then prioritise all of Europe’s (still annoyingly separate) stores mostly on a size basis.

If it weren’t for the content holders (and their sword of Damocles paranoia as mentioned by labrats5) then we would obviously have one single worldwide iTunes store. I don’t care if 99 cents etc. works out as funky numbers in my currency, so long as I can get the content! Apple would be delighted to make all those sales too. And really, so should the content owners. Yet they are not, so there is the problem.

“Looking over at nearby Sweden with its 100 megabit municipal broadband very jealously right now…”

I get my broadband through OptoSunet, the Swedish university nationwide network. My apartment building (only student residents) has a gigabit connection and the individual apartment has 100/100 through CAT6 wires. The 10.5.3 update maxed out at 6 MiB/s. This is obligatory part of my rent and costs me about $22 a month. The service is for students only and is not commercial.

My parents have that municipal broadband with 100/10 speed but it’s way more expensive (can’t remember the price). Difference is that it’s provided by one of the major broadband companies.

With all this nice infrastructure Apple offers very little on iTunes for my country. With ubiquitous fast ADSL (24/1 Mbit/s is pretty much standard) and lots of people who own large flatsceen TVs TV could sell really well if it wasn’t for the lack of content suited to the market.

The second issue, namely the pricing issue, is interesting because the studios actually have a lot to gain from digital downloads. The most obvious is that there is no used reselling of digital downloads. A great number of DVD’s are resold, with the studios netting exactly $0 from the transaction. Pushing a distributing path that has no possible resell market is of great benefit to them. Another obvious benefit is that you never manufacture too many or to few copies. You never pay for overstock. You never lose sales because you’re sold out.

The real reason pricing is so high is because the studios are terrified that people will stop buying DVDs. But as I just pointed out, Digital download may be better for them than DVD, so why are they afraid? Because DVD is a known entity. They are frightened that they will be hit by piracy just like music was. But the reason music was hit so hard had nothing to do with digital distribution encouraging it, or even the CD’s lack of DRM. It was bandwidth.

Here we see that actually all three of your points comes back to bandwidth. Movie piracy isn’t too bad right now, but it will skyrocket in the U.S. the moment bandwidth increases enough to make it practically instantaneous. People will burn movies to DVD, and watch it on their TV, much like they did with music and stereos in the late 90’s. Then the movie studios won’t have the Sword of Damocles hanging over their head anymore: it will have already dropped. Then they will be much more willing to talk to Apple.

It’s also encouraging to see the major points mentioned in the first or second paragraph, by way of an executive summary. It’s not giving anything away; I read your work for its depth of thinking and analysis.

I cannot put any downloaded DIVX/AVI content on it without re-encoding everything to a QuickTime format: too much hassle.

So my Apple TV (bought on day one) is standing idle collecting dust, and I tell everyone not to buy one.