This is just a rumor but the internet has been all a buzz about the possibility of iTunes movies getting a bit of a price increase to $15 each.
Now this doesn’t make any sense AT ALL I’ll prove it to you, currently in the iTunes music store Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is priced at $14.99… hmmmm.
Looks like the pricing is already set (for some movies) at $15. Now this rumor could be saying that the new releases will be priced at $15 instead of $12.99 (which I wouldn’t be too opposed to).
When I first read about this I was assuming that they meant that all of the movies may end up being priced at $15 but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense so after reading a bit more I am now assuming that the $9.99 movies will stay priced at $9.99.
Now the reason this rumor is a little more interesting is for two reasons:
Reason 1: Apple may be doing this to try to lure more studios (specifically Fox) to sign on to put movies in the iTunes store.
Reason 2: This part of the rumor is very intriguing to me, it also mentions that Apple may also be trying to get movie studios to encode iTunes friendly versions of the movie on the DVD so people can import the movie into their iTunes to play them on their iPods, iPhones, and AppleTVs.
I think that the idea of being able to put the DVD into your computer, import the movie into iTunes, and watch it truly wherever I want is absolutely amazing (by the way I’ve always wondered why movie studios never sold HD versions of their movies encoded in MP4 on DVDs, oh well).
I’m curious if any of you would be willing to pay an extra few bucks (or the same price) for a DVD with an iTunes version on the disk?
oh, and Jason Chen (Gizmodo) a pre-encoded version of a movie IS a huge deal, I understand that their are programs that will take a DVD to iPod/AppleTV format with one click but it is a little bit more time consuming than that, maybe the 2-3 hour conversion time for a 1hr 30min movie would be a nice thing to skip.
UPDATE: Sorry, it seems I must have read this story from all the wrong places, the $15 price will be the wholesale price for the movie which means that the price of the movie to the consumer will likely be much more. This also helps point to the possibility of movie rentals in the iTunes store. One quick thing Apple, if a movie rental ends up costing any more than $4 per movie I am NOT going to rent it.