Hollywood Against Jobs' Movie Pricing Plan

Alex Romanelli, Variety writes "Hollywood insiders tell Variety why/how Hollywood is in stalemate with Jobs over movie downloads on iTunes. Jobs wants a flat $9.99 per film download, studios are refusing, insisting upon tiered pricing. On the other side there's a different, longer, analytical story looking at how H'wood executives are still unsure if Jobs should be considered a friend or foe."

typo

[hector_uk]

Jobs is the guys name, it's not "job is"

Perhaps in 1955...

[Elemenope]

But both styles are now generally recognized as correct. Since english doesn't have the equivalent of an Academie Francaise (yes I know, no accents. Well, screw, high school French teachers of the world), thank goodness, it is possible for local variations in common usage to add to to the lexical and syntactic richness and flexibility of the language. For quite a while now, both the xs' and xs's forms have been taught in beginner and college english, and both are in widespread use.

Re:Screw that.

[Ryan Amos]

Jobs is the enemy because he is removing distribution control from the record labels. They seem to care about this as much as they do about profit. Now he wants to do it to the movie industry. They don't understand that one of the reasons iTMS is so popular is that the pricing scheme is so simple. No needing to worry about what price the thing you want to buy is, just $1 a song. They don't realize that whatever hamstrung service they try to use to sell low quality downloads for the same price as the DVD won't catch on.

Or, I'll put it this way for the MPAA, so they might understand: The alternative for most people is NetFlix and a DVD burner.

Re:Can we get it in something that's NOT Quicktime

[bobdapunk]

The problem is that quicktime uses mpeg4 avc, a much more computationaly intensive codec PLUS quicktime is a resource hog. Use VLC or mplayer (I hope they release a good windows GUI soon) to play those quicktime files, you will have much better luck. My X2 3800 went from 80-90% to like 30% during highdef trailer playback when I switched from quicktime to VLC.

emusic

[pedestrian crossing]

If I'm going to buy a whole album off iTunes at a dollar a song, an average of 12 songs would cost me $12 bucks... I pretty much only buy music that's not on the radio, so the cd's I usually look at are between $10-$12... so, for the same price of downloading an album I could have it in physical form (adding the ability to use it in a CD player and to look at pretty album art)... definitely not worth it for me to use iTunes to download all the music I want.
Furthermore, it doesn't help that I don't own and iPod (go Creative Zen, woo!) so iTunes songs are useless to me.

Given what you said, you really should consider emusic [emusic.com]. $0.22 per track for mp3 (no drm) files, that's $2.64 for a 12-song album. Do yourself a favor, do the free trial, browse the collection, and see how you feel. It sounds like it might be good fit for you...

Re:Perhaps in 1955...

[Agelmar]

While it's true that we don't have a direct equivalent to L'Académie française, we do have the Modern Language Association, which also has a style guide that is generally considered authoritative in many communities. (Granted, there are a few other style guides, but I think MLA is the most prevalent.) According to the MLA:

"to form the possessive of any singular proper noun, add an apostrophe and an s"
( 3.4.7.e).

Therefore, as odd as it might look to you, Jobs's is the correct form. (Chicago manual of style also concurs on this issue. There are examples, as well as a few exceptions, at CMS 7.17-23.)

Re:Screw that.

[MooUK]

The artists getting paid less is however not his fault at all. He didn't write, suggest, or sign the artists' contracts.

Re:Screw that.

[fribhey]

That's not always the case. I just paid $6.99 for 4 songs, because the one song I wanted, was only available by purchasing "the album". Apple/iTunes seems to be doing this more and more.

and you do know that the artists are the ones who structure it that way. the artists are the ones who decide if a song is only available by purchasing the entire album.

it's not itunes/apple doing it - but i guess it's a lot easier and cooler to just blame apple for everything.