Research firms urge Hollywood to oust Apple

... they do for movies what amazon did for books. never mind make it easy to buy and rent with no physical media costs.

these guys must work for the mylar lobby.

Apple single-handedly invented an entire market segment and dragged big studios (kicking and screaming) into making profits from it. Let's not forget, Apple makes trivial money on the sale of that content; studios get the lion's share. Its not about money; it's about total control (or loss thereof) by the studios. What the studios don't seem to get is that consumer is still the king. By bundling, re-purposing, packaging and all other methods, studios are trying to squeeze dollars out of consumers, but they aren't buying. Apple has figured it out and knows what consumers want. Studios are just annoyed that Apple knows how to sell contend, and they, themselves the creators of that content, don't have a clue.

Sounds like an Anti-Trust suit in the making. Maybe Apple should hire Bob the Esquire Dinosaur to slap them with their own suits right now.

..and who subsidizes these research firms? who pays for their unbaised studies?

besides, hollywood is already doing this.. forcing Apple to conform to their currupt business models (i.e. Apple TV Rentals).

like most research, this study is about a year too late. but i'm sure it was well funded..

some people. they pay people millions to make good business decisions and if it wasnt working out as a positive for hollywood im sure they wouldn't be in it.

I think just maybe these research guys are assuming the studios have a way to distribute their medias, and a device to distribute them onto.

iTunes Music Store -- it actually wasn't that easy to put together.

I'm sure Apple is not shakin' and squakin'

..and who subsidizes these research firms? who pays for their unbaised studies?

Who says the report is unbiased?

besides, hollywood is already doing this.. forcing Apple to conform to their currupt business models (i.e. Apple TV Rentals).

Interesting. I didn't realize the rental business was a corrupt business model. Could you please explain what the corruption is in this (since it seems to have been going on for 25 years, and you haven't filed the all-important class-action suit to stop it, I'm just curious).

like most research, this study is about a year too late. but i'm sure it was well funded..

And please explain how this is too late (which is odd, since Apple had miniscule sales a year ago in the video world).

I think these "research" firms assume you just throw files on a web page and sell them. Firms like this do not understand why the iPod succeeds, why MacOS X is better than Windows, and why people like to shop at the iTMS. They simply don't get user experience because it cannot be quantified.

I think just maybe these research guys are assuming the studios have a way to distribute their medias, and a device to distribute them onto.

No, I don't think they're assuming anything. They're just saying "Hey, you want to make more money and keep more control, you should do this!", which is pretty correct.

A distribution method isn't that hard to set up (can't be much harder than an on-line music store, and everybody has opened one of those in the last couple of years).

As for devices, the key here is that it would work on a variety of devices. As opposed to Apple's wonderfully vertical 'iTMS->iPod/iPhone/AppleTV and nothing else' market, this talks of various different mobile devices, something Apple refuses to do.

Isn't this just a repackaging, for video, the attempts the music industry (including 3rd party sellers) made to by-pass iTunes? Until there are other viable (ie, have enough market share) players, the only way this would even have a chance of working is if they make their content playable on iPods. And that means no DRM.

Anyone want to take bets when that will happen? Sure, it's happening to a small degree with music, but for video?

I think the best the industry could do would be to publish their content as podcasts with commercials and hope that enough people watch the commercials that they can collect good ad revenue. (Just like with a DVR, you can fast forward through the commercials in a podcast.) Heck, they could even use iTunes to distribute their podcast for free. They would only need to host the content. No need to create a whole user interface and syncing machanism.

That's it! I call dibs and all patent rights to the idea of commercialized podcasts. If any studio starts doing this, I'm suing!!!!