itunes

Showing 42 posts tagged itunes

One Last Cringe for The Office Finale

Bill Carter:

What truly turned their fortunes, however, was that in the first week that NBC shows were available for purchase on iTunes, episodes of “The Office” occupied four of the top five spots. Suddenly NBC was impressed, especially by the makeup of the audience: young, college-educated and affluent. Most shows were made available to such outlets as networks sought new revenue, but “The Office” fit the iTunes audience precisely.

From a show that was going to be cancelled to a nine season run. Makes you wish iTunes had begun selling television shows when Firefly was still around.

What's the problem with ripping DVDs? It takes me 20 minutes with handbrake on my iMac. Then I stream them to my jail broken aTV or my iOS device with an app "Air Video".

Asked by ninjafrog

Yeah, regular users are never going to do that. Never. The solution needs to be similar to iTunes Match: put a DVD in a drive, connect to iTunes, pay $5 (or a monthly/yearly fee), get unlimited access to the HD digital version through iCloud.

Humorous that the biggest barrier to entry there may be the death of the optical disc drive.

rickwebb: Two iTunes comments for the day: 1) I just noticed that while our visualizer Magnetosphere is still in iTunes, they have added three new ones in OS 10.8. Weird.  2) In case you didn’t know, in Magnetosphere (er, “iTunes Visualizer”), you can hit command-? to get a list of commands to control it. In addition to those commands, hitting + or - increases the number of nodes, and hitting a and s increases the number of particles. I just noticed those weren’t in the list of commands. All these years and people probably haven’t known about that functionality.  (Still immensely proud of Robert and Andrew for building this thing. So psyched it’s still there in iTunes, 5 years later. And me in my meager product manager role? Scariest legal negotiation of my life, too. Most proud of the fact that we negotiated with Steve et al to publicly acknowledge the acquisition. Not an easy thing in those days.) 3) New tip I just learned - in iTunes 11, you can easily download all of the old music you’ve bought through the years in ITMS. The other day I downloaded it all onto my MacBook, then made a playlist of hits. So many great old $0.99 purchases of one-it wonders I had completely forgotten about. Been listening to the playlist for days and it is still awesome.  High-res

rickwebb:

Two iTunes comments for the day:

1) I just noticed that while our visualizer Magnetosphere is still in iTunes, they have added three new ones in OS 10.8. Weird. 

2) In case you didn’t know, in Magnetosphere (er, “iTunes Visualizer”), you can hit command-? to get a list of commands to control it. In addition to those commands, hitting + or - increases the number of nodes, and hitting a and s increases the number of particles. I just noticed those weren’t in the list of commands. All these years and people probably haven’t known about that functionality. 

(Still immensely proud of Robert and Andrew for building this thing. So psyched it’s still there in iTunes, 5 years later. And me in my meager product manager role? Scariest legal negotiation of my life, too. Most proud of the fact that we negotiated with Steve et al to publicly acknowledge the acquisition. Not an easy thing in those days.)

3) New tip I just learned - in iTunes 11, you can easily download all of the old music you’ve bought through the years in ITMS. The other day I downloaded it all onto my MacBook, then made a playlist of hits. So many great old $0.99 purchases of one-it wonders I had completely forgotten about. Been listening to the playlist for days and it is still awesome. 

nerdology: Found in my parents basement: a RAZR v3i with the box! So thin!! That iTunes + Cingular box is really funny. The last non-iPhone I had. I remember being so excited to get this just so I could take pictures. 0.3 megapixel pictures or something like that, mind you. My version did not have iTunes integration. I had a wait a year or so for Verizon to test and approve it for use on the network. Do not miss those days. But wow, how Motorola has fallen. High-res

nerdology:

Found in my parents basement: a RAZR v3i with the box! So thin!!

That iTunes + Cingular box is really funny.

The last non-iPhone I had. I remember being so excited to get this just so I could take pictures. 0.3 megapixel pictures or something like that, mind you.

My version did not have iTunes integration. I had a wait a year or so for Verizon to test and approve it for use on the network. Do not miss those days. But wow, how Motorola has fallen.

Fox's New Pre-Window Non-Window Window

Michael Cieply on Fox’s new plan for digital movie releases:

The new system is an aggressive bid to revive consumers’ interest in the purchase of movies, by giving them an earlier shot at films for about $15 each, down from a purchase price that is currently about $20.

Three thoughts:

1) This is really just another windowing system. But smartly, the studios are playing it as “we’re moving the release on this format up!” rather than “we’re pushing the release on all other formats back!”

2) I do like the notion of lowering prices in this new windows from $20 to $15.

3) At the end of the day, it still all comes down to if the movie is worth owning or not. In our age of massive amounts of content spread across many different channels, the answer, sadly, is increasingly “no”. That’s a problem no windowing solution is going to fix.

The article also plays up that fact that Fox is going the don’t-call-it-DRM UltraViolet DRM movement. But they’re leaving out an important tidbit: Fox is also experimenting with this new windows on iTunes, which is not a part of UltraViolet. If you load up iTunes right now, you’ll see Prometheus available for pre-order on September 18 for $14.99 in HD.