Apple prepping iTunes Replay on-demand video service - Page 2

I don't see much ADSL over here at all these days, most broadband is FiOS (Fiber Optic) or Cable (Copper wire), in Florida at least. Your quoted speed is is the same sort of range though. have 25 Mb/ down and 5 Mb up. My family live in UK and complain about contention ratios still being a problem, cable here used to slow down badly during peak usage a few years back but I am not sure since we moved over to fiber optics which never slows. FiOS is sweet! From what i read the French have some pretty spectacular speeds.

On my 4meg DSL connection I can pretty much stream sd content in real time off the Internet right now. So for apple it's more of a billing change.

I hope it's an all you can eat sub service. As apple could totally own the Market. As they have the best selection of content in more countries.

The only thing that bothers me is the name,iTunes replay, sounds like just being able to doownload (knowing apple for a fee) purchased content again.

Please let it be a sub model with the ability to stream to iPods/iPhones apple tv etc

There's load of tv shows I would love to watch again but not own.

There's an app for that...

It's called "simplify media." Stream your iTunes home library (music only) to your iPhone. Needs wifi though..

EDIT: Also works over edge/3g

NetFlix has also partnered with Tivo.

Using NetFlix instant watch using a TiVo is pretty painless. I've watched it often and it works great.

Exactly. Apple is throwing away this opportunity. Netflix IW is popular because it is a fee-based service and not instance-based. I'd pay $25/month to have unlimited streaming to my AppleTV.

Especially if they had the episodes available the next day.

Pretty soon no one will be able to overtake Netflix in the "streaming content" arena.

I don't think it's a matter of Apple throwing away any opportunities.. I think the main reason we have not yet seen a subscription service for iTunes (video) is because Apple is facing resistance/restrictions from the studios..

Steve Jobs was the first to admit that people consume video differently than they do music.

The reality is that both Hollywood and the TV studios are very nervous about Apple taking over the industry like they did with music. 24 hour rentals, no HD on computers, delayed releases, these are all studio restrictions, not Apple's.

The only bummer is you have to go to your account on a computer to put movies in your streaming cue, you can't just browse from your TV/TiVo. AppleTV streaming would be better in this regard.

Video replay on demand might be the distribution system that will make the Apple TV more widely supported. Ideally, Apple should consider providing all the options -- direct purchase, single rental or subscription -- to satisfy various customers.

Direct purchase
This is existing option associated with current use of an Apple TV wherein the customer has the option to download the purchased video. Further, for an added central storage fee (lower than unlimited video subscription) the video purchse owner has option to replay purchases directly from an Apple central server. While the "storage fee" would be an added cost, this must be weighed with respect to the cost incurred to purchase and maintain (and sometimes repair or troubleshoot) a separate storage device.

Individual Rental
This is existing option associated with current use of an Apple TV that targets customers who prefer to rent individual video or multimedia because they do not spend too much time watching various forms of video, and quite discriminating on what videos to view.

Monthly subscription
This is not an existing option associated with current use of an Apple TV. It is preferred by individuals whowatch a lot of videos -- movies, television and other multimedia -- and expect to incur a lower cost compared with the cost of direct purchase or individual rental.

All options are technologically feasible. Apple TV has a more advanced buffering mechanism that allows ongoing download, buffering and viewing, to address the problems associated with streaming video. Apple TV also has the technology for defined duration of viewership of any rental or subscription video, or outright "ownership" of videos that had been purchased.

Royalty payment
Note that in the case of the options -- direct purchase and individual rental of videos -- it is easy to identify and pay the royalty fee to the owner of a video or any multimedia. The pricing allocation for both aforementioned options is already in place, based from negotiations by Apple and multimedia producers.

On the other hand, my hunch why Apple may have been reluctant to offer fixed "monthly subscription" of videos or music is not so much the technology but more the complexity of predicting the source of videos accessed by montly subscribers. Superimpose into this, Apple must negotiate well ahead of time and for a duration (e.g., yearly) the terms of fair and equitable payment of royalties to each of the multimedia companies participating in the subscription program.

It is unlikely for any video or music company to offer in a monthly subscription option for unlimited access to all of a company's multimedia properties -- without assessing a hefty baseline monthly fee from Apple. At the same time, it would not be germane to Apple's "simplicity policy" to adopt the confusing and multiple subscription video packages commonly used by cable companies, or current subscription video services.

Fixed monthly subscription has a future if Apple and multimedia producers can come to fair agreement in resolving the aforementioned issues. As important, the resulting aggregated royalty fees paid to all multimedia producers plus the administrative cost of Apple must result to a monthly subscription cost to customers that would be competitive with, if not lower than, those offered by current video subscription services. This may be where Apple will have difficulty based from the music pricing negotiations for the iTunes.

Speeds might not be the issue, but volume. With Comcast capping customers at 250GB a month and others with more restrictive caps, streaming scores of movies and TV shows (especially 720p) might find themselves up against these caps with either denial of service or additional bandwidth charges for doing so.

I mean 250GB is a large amount of data, but in theory a couple hours of high-quality high definition content a day could hit that limit.

This will be really cool if it works well, but probably a wifi only feature

I'm not sure why you call this "streaming". You are describing a download and play immediately system, rather than streaming. Streaming doesn't make sense through Akamai etc - they want to cache a full copy of the film and send it. Certainly there's no reason for Apple to do actual "streaming".


Well, it needs to average a faster rate than the tv show, but unless it's a genuine 'stream' it doesn't need to have a QoS.

AppleTV HD requires 4.5Mbps. SD requires 1.5Mbps.


Yep. iTunes HD TV rentals, 99c. Brilliant.


At the moment a large chunk of cable sends TV channels - a common transmission to every subscriber - even channels no-one is watching (which increases as we get more and more choices). They're working on only sending the channels people are watching - which should free things up to increase the quality.


Doing this would cost Apple money. The server space isn't filled up, but it costs a lot in Akamai & internet fees to send copies multiple times to the same person if that person only pays once.


And ad supported viewing. Think of it as a single rental but instead of us paying Apple $1, Apple gets paid $1 by advertisers. Maybe Apple can customise & target our ads better than regular TV so we'll watch far fewer ads for the same return.

Die now, another miserable thief of priceless intellectual property!

With all the ISPs messing around with bandwidth and caps on special protocols or IPs to press more money from the one or the other end, this is not for me at the moment.
Another reason might be that Apple isn't doing any good with AppleTV here in Austria.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Netflix subscriber, so I'm not entirely familiar with their content offerings.

My understanding is that Netflix content is based on what's available on DVD (movies and previous seasons of TV shows), not on current TV show episodes. I highly doubt the studios would ever agree to anything like you are suggesting. And the cable companies would be extremely hostile towards is (picture extremely low download limits). You'd essentially be completely destroying the business models of both: ad revenue for the networks and monthly subscriptions fees for the cable company. The networks would insist on a huge share of Apple's revenue to replace all of the lost ad income and the cable company (or other ISP) will demand a much higher fee for your internet connection.

No doubt that we will get there eventually, but it's going to be a long, long way off and will cost more than $25/month.

You're right about speed, but during peak times our ISPs can't cope with volume. My ISP and many others throttle sites that offer large downloads (iTunes is one of them), during peak times I can't start a rental on my Apple TV as it won't arrive for 6-7 hours!

Or ootunes, which does music and videos and radio and works over wifi/edge/3g

Good to know... I was wrong about Simplify though, it works over wifi/edge/3g as well..

The two things holding Apple TV back from being a Comcast killer are: (1) a subscription service that would include a critical mass of content, including same-night or next-day episodes of current shows from all of the major networks, and (2) the ability to show live content like cable news, sports, award shows, etc.

Apple have to do streaming to be able to show live content. Switching to a streaming distribution model for TV, movies, etc., would put all the technological pieces in place for Apple to compete directly with the cable carriers.

The licensing and pricing could be much more difficult for Apple to work out. It would be difficult for Apple to roll out a subscription with limited content -- say, a dozen current shows from three or four different networks -- and then scale up later:

1. Increasing the subscription price as they add content would be very un-Apple.

2. A la carte plans would be un-Apple in complexity and potentially lock users in to shows or networks they later decide not to watch.

3. A lot of content producers will want the same revenue treatment they get from the cable carriers and will want to lock in sports, awards shows, etc., to preserve the revenue from those streams from bypassing the networks and going directly to Apple.

How to slice up the subscription plans would depend a lot on whether Apple intends for consumers to supplement their existing cable or replace it. I can't see paying more than $20 for TV content without cancelling my cable. A full-blown package would probably be $29 or $39 with a la carte options for premium networks, upgraded sports packages and movies.

If Apple is headed this direction, they will probably tiptoe into it -- music videos now, then changing PPV movies from download to streaming, then bring out a full-blown subscription TV package with a big marketing campaign.

Very exciting!

Cool. I thought that seemed odd. Simplify is cheaper and easier to install (usually) but is slower to sync and on my mac was using 50% of the CPU!