Barry Levine, newsfactor
The price will be $14.99 for new releases, and they can be viewed on an iPod with video, a Mac or PC, or a TV using Apple TV. Some of the new titles include American Gangster, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, Cloverfield, I Am Legend, There Will Be Blood, and Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Disney Sells 4 Million
Movie distribution through iTunes is becoming an increasingly important channel for the studios. In March, for instance, Disney CEO Bob Iger told news media that his company had sold four million movies through iTunes since it started offering movies though the online service in 2006.
Earlier this year, Apple announced that movie rentals were available on iTunes one month after their DVD release. The January announcement set rental prices of $3 to $4 for a 30-day rental period for movies from the major studios.
Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst with industry research firm JupiterResearch, said he expects other online movie services, such as Amazon Unbox or Movielink, will offer a similar deal in the not-too-distant future.
He noted that, although the iTunes story has received the most attention, several of the major studios were also making their movies available through cable video-on-demand (VOD) services on the same day as the DVD release.
DVD Sales Increased
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Warner Bros. would release its movies to some VOD systems at the same time it releases them to DVD. A DVD release is generally about four to five months after a theatrical release.
The Times article cited a Warner Bros. previous experiment with releasing movies to VOD and DVD simultaneously, which found that DVD rentals fell only 3 to 5 percent, and DVD sales increased. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes was quoted as noting that digital distribution, compared to DVD distribution, results in a 60 to 70 percent margin instead of a 20 to 30 percent margin.
Some observers have speculated that high-definition movies offered through the iTunes Store and cable systems could adversely affect the sales of Blu-ray high-definition DVD players, even though Blu-ray has won the format war with HD DVD.
While that impact is not yet clear, sales of Blu-ray players dropped 40 percent from January to February in the U.S., and grew only two percent from February to March, according to the NPD Group. Toshiba announced on Feb. 19 that it would stop making HD-DVD players. NPD analysts have said their survey indicates that the price of DVD players is currently a key factor.
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