Today Apple quietly opened up the UK iTunes store for video. And it’s all at those great prices that the English have come to expect. Let me break it down:
In America a song from iTunes will cost you $0.99 (£0.49), and a video $1.99 (£0.99).
In England the same song will cost you £0.79 ($1.59), which is pretty bad. Anyway, at this stupid exchange rate you’d expect a video to cost £1.59 then, right? Wrong, video’s £1.89 ($3.81).
Wheeeee~
Even with the discounts for buying a whole season it’s rarely cheaper than getting the DVDs off Amazon (money quote: “If I am not going to get the physical box, extras, free artworks etc. then I want to pay a damned sight less than the DVD price.”). The DVDs that you can play in anything, and generally have a higher resolution (typically 720*480, as opposed to a maximum width of 640px for iTunes content).
Of course, the iTunes videos are pristine h.264 from the source, and thus so much better than anything Handbrake will make from the MPEG2 on those DVDs. Not to mention they’ll play without further dicking about on your iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. What price convenience?
Yay for close-knit software/device/service ecosystems!
Not that price, you buffoon.
Seriously, I know you are hard for having things uber-encoded and tripled raeped and inter-fudgealated and god knows what else, but aside from horribly pixelation or the audio being out of sync, on a telly can you really tell?
Or hell, even on a monitor? ‘Cause you’re not going to be sat with your face pressed against the back-lit LCD to watch something. Because if you are, you are going to be disappointed with the quality. WITH EVERYTHING.
Jesus. Stop with this obsession. If you want, I have a ruby script to transcode any video into an iPod video. Or failing that, just buy a 1080p TV and a blu-ray player, a copy of one of the four films out in blu-ray and a tub of vaseline and jerk it ’till you’re exhausted.
And for songs, go to eMusic and get them at 75 for £15 and no DRM. Sure you may not be able to get the Kaiser Chiefs or Madonna, but you could get something good instead?
Speaking of DRM, are the videos from iTunes steeped in it? If so, seriously fuck that.
Nice (I guessing) JS/ Ajax for leaving comments, btw. Even scrolls you up to your comment, very sleek.
Dude, I’m not saying it’s a good price either.
Just, you know, pointing out the advantages.
Thanks for using my K2 style! Your modifications are really beautiful, I’m impressed.
Thanks man, but I didn’t change it much (I think? I suddenly can’t remember).
It is my ambition some day to make it completely variable-width, but I have a lot on right now.