Apple to sell video downloads

While my time with the Creative Zen was short and sweet, I realized that a technically great device was hampered by the lack of a great content acquisition model. It was damned near impossible to get a DVD that I owned onto the device; I had to use a few illegal products to break the encryption of the DVD and then wait hours for it to encode the file properly. Also, the content available from MovieLink and CinemaNow offer an array of mind-boggling license terms that were difficult to keep straight (some were downloadable, some weren't; some were active for 3 days, some were active for 24 hours after beginning to watch it; etc etc). Not only that, these companies rarely provided any really good movie choices.

I know the idea of the Portable Media Center was to acquire content from your Windows Media Center PC, but you still had to wait a major amount of time for the video to transcode to the proper format for the PMC. There really was no concept of instant portable gratification like that found with the iTunes Music Store. While Microsoft is planning on a second coming of the Portable Media Center, unless the content model is hashed out, I think it may be another extremely niche product, catering to a subset of those Windows Media Center users with money to burn and TV on their minds just about everywhere they go.

Enter Apple. The company that, dare I say, perfected the music download model (while others have tried to immitate, none have gained the adoption of the masses that Apple as thus far garnered) is planning to bring music videos to your hand. It's an obvious leap to see that Apple will be offering movie and TV show downloads (assuming their lawyers can play nice with the TV and movie industry lawyers) in the near future. Why will this win too? Because Apple knows how to create a viable content model. They'll make it work right. I'm hoping for native Xvid, Divx, MPEG-2, OGM, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink support, but will settle for some sort of super speedy conversion or wrapping technology that obviates the need for the Windows Media Player model of hours-long transcode sessions.

Hannibal of ArsTechnica speculates on Apple's upcoming video download service (quite an interesting if not most-likely accurate portrayal of things to be):

The iTMS video section will initially be limited to music videos in QuickTime format, as well as some Pixar content (shorts, and maybe a few films). All downloadable video will come wrapped in proprietary Apple DRM, and (as is the case with AAC) this QT + DRM format will be the only DRM-enabled video format that the video iPod will be capable of playing. Video iPod owners will be able to use the device to play a few non-DRM types of video, like MP4, DIVX, etc., and they may be able to rip DVDs and play them on the iPod, but they won't be able to play DRM'd video downloaded from competing online video services. In this respect, Apple will attempt to replicate in the video download space the successful business model that they innovated in the music download space. They'll also be going into direct competition with Microsoft's Windows Media format.

Link.