whats next? iTheater?

grad studentgrad student
Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
self explanatory really... an iTunes for movie rentals and purchases... iTheater?



doesn't seem that far off. DVD quality with MPEG4 compression... a 500MB download is do-able for a pretty decent number of people... it'd take less time than going to the video store, looking through all the isles, waiting in line... bla bla. Add in support to get the video over a lan/airport to my TV, and it'd be pretty sweet.



howabout this:



to rent a DVD, select it... DL it... have it notify you when its done (through system beep, SMS to your phone... whatever...). Keep it as long as you want to. Once you watch it the first time, you have 48 hours left to continue watching it... then your "rental" is up... renew if you want to bla bla... This way - you can "rent" a video, let it DL, and watch it when you want to - allowing you to speculatively rent videos for the weekend, or the next time you get a chance to watch the thing...



sound good? thoughts?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    netromacnetromac Posts: 863member
    Thought about it, and I think its the natural evolution of serving digital content over the net. The only problem so far has been bandwith, and with more and more people having fast internet connections it's only a question of time before we'll have a similar service for movies. It will take time before we'll se a iTheater though, maybe a couple of years - one year minimum.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    grad studentgrad student Posts: 184member
    the bandwidth would be the biggest issue... but with speculative downloads, and opportunistic downloads that resume if you loose a connection, and scale back the transfer rate if your surfing the web or something (perhaps the bandwidth consumption could be selectable ie: unobtrusive, quick, expedite in case of bandwidth contention concerns)... i think a decent number of people would use it today if it were available. at least one (me).
  • Reply 3 of 8
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,425member
    They should be able to get it lower than 500MB.



    I figure a Divx rip is around what 600-800MB. If Mpeg4 is all that it's cracked up to be I expect to see 350-400MB for a full movie.



    That's still alot of bandwidth though. DSL and Cable providers would hate it. LOL.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Looks like Apples own backbone would be the bottleneck...



    DivX and MP4, woulodn´t they need about the same bandwith?
  • Reply 5 of 8
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hmurchison

    They should be able to get it lower than 500MB.



    I figure a Divx rip is around what 600-800MB. If Mpeg4 is all that it's cracked up to be I expect to see 350-400MB for a full movie.



    That's still alot of bandwidth though. DSL and Cable providers would hate it. LOL.



    you dont have much experience w/ divx/3ivx/xvid/mp4 do you. theyre all the same. its all mpeg 4, just different flavors. honestly, ive tried using apple's mp4 codec to rip a dvd and it looked like crap, even at 150k/sec (most divx movies are around 70-100k)



    i use 3ivx to rip my collection (and no, i dont share them, i throw them on my ipod and watch them when im working at school) and each one is roughly 700 megs. i try to shoot for the size of a cd tho, but the smaller you get the more you lose, and w/ mp4, you are already losing a lot
  • Reply 6 of 8
    kim kap solkim kap sol Posts: 2,987member
    This will definitely not happen for quite a few years. Why?



    Broadband just isn't fast enough yet.

    Apple would suffer from the download loads.

    HDs aren't big enough yet.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by kim kap sol

    This will definitely not happen for quite a few years. Why?



    Broadband just isn't fast enough yet.

    Apple would suffer from the download loads.

    HDs aren't big enough yet.



    HD's are big enough definatly, because you wouldn't be able to have it on ur computer for more then a certin amount of time (renting not buying remember?)



    and there is no way it would be faster to download a 600MB movie then it is to go to the video store



    i'm there and back in 20min if i dont knwo what i'm doing



    100k/s download (which couldn't be supported by all) would still take longer then that



    isn't 100k/s for an hour only 360,000k?
  • Reply 8 of 8
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    yep, it would take 2 hours for a decently encoded mp4/divx
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