How To Add Movies To Iphone From Itunes

iTunes Movie Rental Review

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I've used iTunes for quite a while as my main source for music, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks. But I never bothered with it too much for movies because I had no interest in buying most movies. I already have a DVD collection of around 200 movies, and I learned through that experience that it's not really worth it to own a lot of movies since I rarely watch most of them. I bought Apocalypto and Hatari, at one point, from iTunes, but after that I just didn't bother to buy any more.

So how good is Apple's movie rental service? Is it time to dump your Netflix subscription? Should you blow off Blockbuster now? We'll find out. You can also view my video of iTunes or click the "Play Video" graphic on the right.

Pricing
Let's start with pricing since everybody is probably wondering if it's cheaper or worth bothering. Here's how Apple is breaking down the costs of renting movies from iTunes:

Library Title – $2.99
New Release – $3.99
HD Rentals – $4.99 (apparently only for Apple TV initially later this month, not sure if this will be available for computers as well later)

All in all the pricing isn't too bad at all; it seems about on par with cable TV's "on demand" products. However, there are a couple of things I don't like. The definition of "Library Title" seems too broad to me and I think there should be a "Classic" sub-category for movies that are older than 30 years—and the price should be around $0.99. That would encourage a lot more rentals since it's a bit ridiculous to expect people to pay three bucks for an ancient movie from the 1950s or whatever.

I take great exception to the pricing of HD rentals, however. Five bucks just because it's HD? Hey, it's the same content—it just might look a little bit better. I smell the foul stench of movie studio greed on the HD pricing. It's a way of gouging customers because of the perceived value of it being in HD. Big deal, HD is nice but it's not necessary at all to enjoy a film, and I wonder how many people will skip paying the extra buck and just go with the non-HD version?

Pricing really is critical. If it's unreasonably expensive then consumers might simply opt to use BitTorrent to illegally download films. That would not help encourage the growth of digital movie downloads from iTunes and other places. I can't help but wonder if the movie studios might be screwing themselves by pricing HD content just a bit too high.

Frankly, come to think of it, why not drop the pricing by a buck across all categories? Perhaps something like this:

Library Title – $1.99
New Release – $2.99
HD Movie – $3.99

That seems a bit more reasonable to me and would encourage more "spur of the moment" movie rentals via iTunes. I suspect that Steve Jobs went along with this pricing just to get his foot in the door with rentals, and he might come back later and try to negotiate some different pricing once the market has grown a little bit. Never underestimate the power of Jobs' giant ego and (mostly) benevolent tyranny when it comes to dealing with the movie studios.

By the way, while I'm barking about pricing, the amount charged to buy movies from iTunes should also be lowered. Who wants to pay $9.99 for a movie from 1948? And the studios wonder why there haven't been more online sales? Cut the price to $4.99 or less and I bet you'll see some additional sales of these older flicks and more rentals. Continued…

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