- Poor selection. The whole point of an online video store is that there is no limit of shelf space.
- Products that constantly change from only rentable, to rentable and buyable, to only buyable, and back again. To paraphrase a movie, "iTunes is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get."
- A lot of the back catalog is still SD only.
- Unpredictable download speed. 80% of the time a movie will download in 10 minutes, but the other 20% it will download in like 7 hours, which is useless if you were renting it to watch that night.
- No keyword searching on the store. You can't e.g. look for a movie with a "mystery" and a "genius."
- The metadata is general is not up to scratch, actor names are sometimes missing or not hyperlinked. It seems like they shoe-horned movies in to their music store instead of designing a database specially for movies.
1. Apple iTunes has more than 20,000 movies.
2. Blame HBO's restrictive policies.
3. Blame the production companies who want to milk customers for SD then charge them for the HD version as well.
Yes. Media Fears... RIAA... MPAA... The RIAA continues to believe that Apple has single-handledly destroyed their revenue model... The prized "album."
Have you not experienced a "fandroid" blowing a head gasket? The "incongruous, inconsistent" user interface that has "ludicrous latency" and "constantly crashes" is virtually an Internet meme. When confronted with facts, the issues with iTunes on an underpowered computer are virtually the only fact-based argument they have against Apple.
It might not be just a matter of being underpowered... My wife's 2Ghz, Core2duo, white iMac with 2GB RAM might run iTunes more efficiently than a lot of PCs.
As I understand it, there is a key architechtural difference between Windows and OS X that affects Apple software, namely iTunes (since that and Safari is about the only software Apple makes for PCs): on OS X, each process in iTunes can spawn an independent thread to be sent to the processor(s); in Windows, the OS bundles up threads from various software and the system into system threads that get sent together to the processor at regular intervals.
As far as UI inconsistencies, I hadnt really been bothered by it... different types of media benefit from slightly different view options or defaults, and I accept that the Store is a window into Apple's online showroom.
On the other hand, there are a couple of things that really annoy me that i think Apple needs to fix: one big one for me occurs while browsing apps on my iPad: if i am looking in a Category, or I have done a search and several hundred or more apps come up, i start scrolling through the pages... If I want to go into an app that catches my eye to read its description, sometimes i can get back to where i was by hitting the back arrow (eg. page showing 274-282 of 637); BUT, invariably, if i install that app, i get jerked out of the app store, and when i oppen it again, yes I am on the same app, but the back button takes me back to page one of my search! And i have to scroll through the first 300 apps again, to find where i was before i installed that app! Really annoying.
I get 12 mbps on my cable connection (which is pretty darn good)
I guess that is pretty good in USA, but it sounds pretty low to me. I am as far out in the sticks as I can be in NL (of course everything is smaller) in a village of 4000, and our service is nothing special, but we get 20Mb/s. My dad in a small town in the middle of the UK gets 35. Many cities in Europe have services providing 50 - 150 Mb.
Too bad Netflix doesn't have enough worth while content. Actually some of their licenses have expired and they're not in any financial position to start paying out for good content, at least not now.
Time will tell. Gaining market share is a start.
Apple could definitely compete if they started a monthly subscription service as opposed to
The whole iTunes and iTunes store and everything iTunes whatever interface and search engine is lousy and pathetic. Even the iTunes player does not have the essential resume playback feature that was available on SoundJam MP from where iTunes was developed 12 years ago!!! That is extremely useful to listen to long playlists from head to tail. So, the player resumes playing the last song played after quitting iTunes, restarting the Mac, etc.
Yes. Media Fears... RIAA... MPAA... The RIAA continues to believe that Apple has single-handledly destroyed their revenue model... The prized "album."
Have you not experienced a "fandroid" blowing a head gasket? The "incongruous, inconsistent" user interface that has "ludicrous latency" and "constantly crashes" is virtually an Internet meme. When confronted with facts, the issues with iTunes on an underpowered computer are virtually the only fact-based argument they have against Apple.
The RIAA was suing people for stealing music. And the complaints about the album was in the 90's, wasn't it? I would hardly call a couple of fandroid on an internet forum so many haters. If they really didn't like iTunes, they just wouldn't use it. Not that they could use it with an Android phone anyway. Come on, it's 2012 and everyone loves the iPhone. Don't you see the lines at the Apple store?
I signed up to Netflix last month. Seemed like a good deal but the choice is really poor. There are some good quality movies but they're all old or so regularly screened on terrestrial TV that we've seen them several times. Most of these films are available in the bargain bucket for £3 a pop.The rest is made of of TV series and rubbish B movies that never made it to the big screen,
Needless to say, my subscription is now cancelled. That £7 a month would be better invested in owning one decent DVD,
I have no problem with no 'news' access since I have access to the internet but Fox News isn't a news service, it's an entertainment channel (on par with many AM radio stations) so i don't get your point.
Ah, okay you're one of them. Now I understand. Well to help you going forward in order for sarcasm to be funny it has to be based on reality, otherwise it sounds like crazy ramblings. All news channels Fox, MSNBC, etc. have both news programming and opinion programming. Because you may not politically agree with the editorial programs does not mean the news programs are not news programs.
Very surprising. I cancelled my membership last month, as the Netflix selection for streaming movies is horrible. They only have a handful of new titles to stream, and rarely add anything new from week to week. If you like B and C movies, there's plenty to choose from, but be prepared to be scrolling through to cherry pick. It's only $8 per month, but a wasted $8 is a wasted $8.
Consumers want content availability at a fixed price, like Pandora or Spotify or NetFlix. The al la carte model used by Apple is antiquated and not going to endure. Presumably, with the rumored Apple TV, we will see a new, less costly to consumer delivery model from them. I hope so at least. Since I've been turned onto Spotify, my musical purchases from Apple are virtually nil. Why would a rational consumer pay for something that is available at virtually no cost?
Based on the comments here so far it seems Apple, while losing ground on the content front, is fine on the hardware front. I believe Apple has a bigger revenue stream in hardware. The title of this article is quite alarmist. So is Apple supposed to be shaking in its boots right now? Has Tim Cook called an emergency board meeting to discuss this devastating news? Or is this yet another way for Apple to sell its hardware? Netflix's market cap is $3.5 billion, chump change if Apple should decide to buy it but I think the best route for Apple is to build hardware that takes advantage of this new paradigm. I can't wait for the day when I can choose my content, including traditional TV channels, a la carte for a reasonable monthly fee.
The latest versions of iTunes have more features than 4.x: AirPlay, Genius/Ping/whatever, iTunes Match, iTunes Store expansions, iOS device syncing and management to name a few. (We can debate the utility of some of these 'features' and whether they should all be rolled into one app some other time.)
FYI On my 10.6 system, iTunes 10.6.1 weighs in at 239.2MB.
About 120MB of that are resource bundles to support 29 different languages (at approximately 4MB each), 17.6MB of help data, 27.6MB of universal resources (icons, etc.), and approximately 76MB for the actual app executable.
These numbers don't seem that unreasonable given all the hats iTunes wears these days.
You can remove those language bundles to save disk space if you really need to. But honestly I don't mind their "one version for everyone everywhere" mentality on this. My machine shouldn't need to hit the internet to download resources just because I switched the OS into Spanish or Italian. And it's better from a support perspective too, there is just one version of iTunes for all markets, not 29 different ones.
Consumers want content availability at a fixed price, like Pandora or Spotify or NetFlix. The al la carte model used by Apple is antiquated and not going to endure.
Speak for yourself. Consumers don't want that. We want to own our content.
Quote:
Why would a rational consumer pay for something that is available at virtually no cost?
Because it isn't? Because of ownership? Myriad reasons. Take your pick.
I have given up upgrading it so no idea how bloated the current versions are.
I don't follow what you're getting at. iTunes v4.2 came out in 2003. We're talking nearly a decade ago. Of course the app has gotten larger over time. It's more complex and it does a lot more. How many more localizations does it support? I'm sure if you look at Safari today over IE in System 7 you'll see that Safari is much larger but I don't think anyone would say IE for Mac is better than Safari.
Could iTunes be a smaller app? I'm sure it can. Should it be a smaller app? I don't see why that is important. What I'd like to see is all apps lessen their memory footprint and CPU usage while being faster. I'd also like to see the app not look at complex for the average user which does not mean separating all parts of iTunes in a dozen separate apps.
Using FiOS 25 / 25 we use Netflix via an Apple TV and Apple Airport Extreme to watch HD TV on a large screen every night flawlessly. To all those that moan about problems I can assure them it isn't Netflix, rather it's their ISP, their hardware or connection speed.
We use Netflix via a Roku on a crappy Verizon DSL (that I'm always annoyed with for it's sluggishness) and it works great. Buffers reasonably, plays smoothly. Totally fine.
Netflix's performance is largely based on a combination of the company's decision to directly charge for SVOD access
Which makes this data hugely misleading, and all but useless. Netflix did NOT grow their SVOD revenue 10,000% last year. Nor did they have 0% revenue from it in 2009. They simply made a business decision/accounting change so that they now bill separately for SVOD from their disc business. Before you got SVOD for "free" if you subscribed to their disc business, so they apparently never counted or apportioned any of that revenue towards the online movie market. This should have been made more clear, to put some perspective on the sensationalized 10,000% growth number.
If you want to know how they are doing, looks at their overall subscribers statistics, churn, and revenue. Or, just look at their stock price.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii
iTunes Movies has these problems in my opinion:
- Poor selection. The whole point of an online video store is that there is no limit of shelf space.
- Products that constantly change from only rentable, to rentable and buyable, to only buyable, and back again. To paraphrase a movie, "iTunes is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get."
- A lot of the back catalog is still SD only.
- Unpredictable download speed. 80% of the time a movie will download in 10 minutes, but the other 20% it will download in like 7 hours, which is useless if you were renting it to watch that night.
- No keyword searching on the store. You can't e.g. look for a movie with a "mystery" and a "genius."
- The metadata is general is not up to scratch, actor names are sometimes missing or not hyperlinked. It seems like they shoe-horned movies in to their music store instead of designing a database specially for movies.
1. Apple iTunes has more than 20,000 movies.
2. Blame HBO's restrictive policies.
3. Blame the production companies who want to milk customers for SD then charge them for the HD version as well.
4. Yes, could be better.
5. I haven't noticed such an issue.
It might not be just a matter of being underpowered... My wife's 2Ghz, Core2duo, white iMac with 2GB RAM might run iTunes more efficiently than a lot of PCs.
As I understand it, there is a key architechtural difference between Windows and OS X that affects Apple software, namely iTunes (since that and Safari is about the only software Apple makes for PCs): on OS X, each process in iTunes can spawn an independent thread to be sent to the processor(s); in Windows, the OS bundles up threads from various software and the system into system threads that get sent together to the processor at regular intervals.
As far as UI inconsistencies, I hadnt really been bothered by it... different types of media benefit from slightly different view options or defaults, and I accept that the Store is a window into Apple's online showroom.
On the other hand, there are a couple of things that really annoy me that i think Apple needs to fix: one big one for me occurs while browsing apps on my iPad: if i am looking in a Category, or I have done a search and several hundred or more apps come up, i start scrolling through the pages... If I want to go into an app that catches my eye to read its description, sometimes i can get back to where i was by hitting the back arrow (eg. page showing 274-282 of 637); BUT, invariably, if i install that app, i get jerked out of the app store, and when i oppen it again, yes I am on the same app, but the back button takes me back to page one of my search! And i have to scroll through the first 300 apps again, to find where i was before i installed that app! Really annoying.
Too bad Netflix doesn't have enough worth while content. Actually some of their licenses have expired and they're not in any financial position to start paying out for good content, at least not now.
Time will tell. Gaining market share is a start.
Apple could definitely compete if they started a monthly subscription service as opposed to
à la carte content.
The whole iTunes and iTunes store and everything iTunes whatever interface and search engine is lousy and pathetic. Even the iTunes player does not have the essential resume playback feature that was available on SoundJam MP from where iTunes was developed 12 years ago!!! That is extremely useful to listen to long playlists from head to tail. So, the player resumes playing the last song played after quitting iTunes, restarting the Mac, etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacBook Pro
Yes. Media Fears... RIAA... MPAA... The RIAA continues to believe that Apple has single-handledly destroyed their revenue model... The prized "album."
Have you not experienced a "fandroid" blowing a head gasket? The "incongruous, inconsistent" user interface that has "ludicrous latency" and "constantly crashes" is virtually an Internet meme. When confronted with facts, the issues with iTunes on an underpowered computer are virtually the only fact-based argument they have against Apple.
The RIAA was suing people for stealing music. And the complaints about the album was in the 90's, wasn't it? I would hardly call a couple of fandroid on an internet forum so many haters. If they really didn't like iTunes, they just wouldn't use it. Not that they could use it with an Android phone anyway. Come on, it's 2012 and everyone loves the iPhone. Don't you see the lines at the Apple store?
iTunes has become bloatware, even on a Mac.
iTunes ap:
ver size
4.2 24.6 mb
4.9 32.8
7.3.1 98
8.2.1 140.1
9 150.3
9.2.1 176.6
I have given up upgrading it so no idea how bloated the current versions are.
I signed up to Netflix last month. Seemed like a good deal but the choice is really poor. There are some good quality movies but they're all old or so regularly screened on terrestrial TV that we've seen them several times. Most of these films are available in the bargain bucket for £3 a pop.The rest is made of of TV series and rubbish B movies that never made it to the big screen,
Needless to say, my subscription is now cancelled. That £7 a month would be better invested in owning one decent DVD,
Netflix will not survive unless it offers up to date content from all studios.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
I have no problem with no 'news' access since I have access to the internet but Fox News isn't a news service, it's an entertainment channel (on par with many AM radio stations) so i don't get your point.
Ah, okay you're one of them. Now I understand. Well to help you going forward in order for sarcasm to be funny it has to be based on reality, otherwise it sounds like crazy ramblings. All news channels Fox, MSNBC, etc. have both news programming and opinion programming. Because you may not politically agree with the editorial programs does not mean the news programs are not news programs.
Good one !!
Very surprising. I cancelled my membership last month, as the Netflix selection for streaming movies is horrible. They only have a handful of new titles to stream, and rarely add anything new from week to week. If you like B and C movies, there's plenty to choose from, but be prepared to be scrolling through to cherry pick. It's only $8 per month, but a wasted $8 is a wasted $8.
Consumers want content availability at a fixed price, like Pandora or Spotify or NetFlix. The al la carte model used by Apple is antiquated and not going to endure. Presumably, with the rumored Apple TV, we will see a new, less costly to consumer delivery model from them. I hope so at least. Since I've been turned onto Spotify, my musical purchases from Apple are virtually nil. Why would a rational consumer pay for something that is available at virtually no cost?
Based on the comments here so far it seems Apple, while losing ground on the content front, is fine on the hardware front. I believe Apple has a bigger revenue stream in hardware. The title of this article is quite alarmist. So is Apple supposed to be shaking in its boots right now? Has Tim Cook called an emergency board meeting to discuss this devastating news? Or is this yet another way for Apple to sell its hardware? Netflix's market cap is $3.5 billion, chump change if Apple should decide to buy it but I think the best route for Apple is to build hardware that takes advantage of this new paradigm. I can't wait for the day when I can choose my content, including traditional TV channels, a la carte for a reasonable monthly fee.
The latest versions of iTunes have more features than 4.x: AirPlay, Genius/Ping/whatever, iTunes Match, iTunes Store expansions, iOS device syncing and management to name a few. (We can debate the utility of some of these 'features' and whether they should all be rolled into one app some other time.)
FYI On my 10.6 system, iTunes 10.6.1 weighs in at 239.2MB.
About 120MB of that are resource bundles to support 29 different languages (at approximately 4MB each), 17.6MB of help data, 27.6MB of universal resources (icons, etc.), and approximately 76MB for the actual app executable.
These numbers don't seem that unreasonable given all the hats iTunes wears these days.
You can remove those language bundles to save disk space if you really need to. But honestly I don't mind their "one version for everyone everywhere" mentality on this. My machine shouldn't need to hit the internet to download resources just because I switched the OS into Spanish or Italian. And it's better from a support perspective too, there is just one version of iTunes for all markets, not 29 different ones.
-K
Quote:
Originally Posted by xxSampleXX
Consumers want content availability at a fixed price, like Pandora or Spotify or NetFlix. The al la carte model used by Apple is antiquated and not going to endure.
Speak for yourself. Consumers don't want that. We want to own our content.
Quote:
Why would a rational consumer pay for something that is available at virtually no cost?
Because it isn't? Because of ownership? Myriad reasons. Take your pick.
I don't follow what you're getting at. iTunes v4.2 came out in 2003. We're talking nearly a decade ago. Of course the app has gotten larger over time. It's more complex and it does a lot more. How many more localizations does it support? I'm sure if you look at Safari today over IE in System 7 you'll see that Safari is much larger but I don't think anyone would say IE for Mac is better than Safari.
Could iTunes be a smaller app? I'm sure it can. Should it be a smaller app? I don't see why that is important. What I'd like to see is all apps lessen their memory footprint and CPU usage while being faster. I'd also like to see the app not look at complex for the average user which does not mean separating all parts of iTunes in a dozen separate apps.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
Using FiOS 25 / 25 we use Netflix via an Apple TV and Apple Airport Extreme to watch HD TV on a large screen every night flawlessly. To all those that moan about problems I can assure them it isn't Netflix, rather it's their ISP, their hardware or connection speed.
We use Netflix via a Roku on a crappy Verizon DSL (that I'm always annoyed with for it's sluggishness) and it works great. Buffers reasonably, plays smoothly. Totally fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
Netflix's performance is largely based on a combination of the company's decision to directly charge for SVOD access
Which makes this data hugely misleading, and all but useless. Netflix did NOT grow their SVOD revenue 10,000% last year. Nor did they have 0% revenue from it in 2009. They simply made a business decision/accounting change so that they now bill separately for SVOD from their disc business. Before you got SVOD for "free" if you subscribed to their disc business, so they apparently never counted or apportioned any of that revenue towards the online movie market. This should have been made more clear, to put some perspective on the sensationalized 10,000% growth number.
If you want to know how they are doing, looks at their overall subscribers statistics, churn, and revenue. Or, just look at their stock price.