iTunes movie purchases now available same day as DVD

I really don't mind the DVD-exclusive window for movies. What really bothers me is having to wait for television episodes to show up. I would like to be able to download LOST to watch on my TV as soon as it's done airing in my time zone. I don't like having to wait until the next day.

what about australia? we cant even rent yet?

i agree. get rid of the DRM.
i buy dvd's because i dont have to worry about losing them in a reinstall. this another reason digital downloads seem overpriced and dont represent good value to me.

give me hard copy of anything over a digital one (or a big discount). or both. =)

I'm another one who won't start buying until the DRM is removed, too limiting. Watermark, by all means. I don't want to give them to the internet. I do not however want to remain locked into Apple products for the rest of my life. Something better may come along.. I also have a 360 in another room perfectly capable of playing h.264, and will not be buying another Apple TV just so i can rent flicks in a room of my choice. Get rid of the DRM apple!

This is a good strategy on the part of apple as it chips away at one of the last remaining advantages DVDs had over the online distribution model - availability.

The benefits of physical media is vastly overstated. I have literally hundreds of DVDs in drawers that I purchased, watched once and filed away. The cases and inserts have long ago been discarded because they take up too much space. I have invested thousands of dollars in these movies, but I never watch them - it's too time consuming to flip through all of the discs.

This announcement moves Apple closer to an entirely new revenue stream - think AppleTV meets Kaleidescape. Apple as the initial distribution channel and archival mechanism for previously purchased movies.

Imagine being able to purchase a movie, download a copy to an AppleTV for watching, then relegate the movie to archive based on some criteria. Instead of shelves and file cabinet as an archive, they are digitally 'archived' by apple, show up in AppleTV, are searchable, immediately accessible, and can be put back into local storage if I want to watch offline.

Everyone benefits in this model (except Best Buy, Netflix and the like). The movie studios have cut out the production cost for DVDs, a cut of which apple takes, still leaving a net savings. Apple cements its position as the premiere distribution channel for movies AND gets a free revenue stream for maintaining customers' movie libraries (free because they are already storing the movies - they just have to maintain a list of what I am able to get access to. There are no additional storage costs. This would apply to music as well).

As a customer, I can pay the same price to buy a movie as I do now, get access to it instantly without having to go anywhere, and readily access any movie I've ever bought whenever I want without having to worry about hard drive failure, upgrading computers, constantly purchasing additional space for my library, etc. I'd rather pay $5-$10/month for the service than $200 on hard drives every time I ran out of space.

In a recent AppleTV upgrade, the syncing method changed - rather than only being able to access content that was tagged for syncing, AppleTV now provides access to all of the content in the iTunes library if it is available and only local content if it is not. How easy would it be to change to a remote sync concept?

Sony and microsoft should be paying close attention to this, because it is the perfect distribution model for PS3 and XBox 360. A PS3 with a 250GB hard drive would be able to store ~10 games locally with the rest available on-demand when I want to play them.

If we had the same capability to burn movies to disc as we do with music purchases, I think iTunes movies would sell like crazy. People are just wary of having something exist only on their computer (or TV) and want a physical copy just for piece of mind.

Studios need to ease up. We can still have some DRM, but letting us burn a single copy in a standard format would not kill the studios. If they want to make it "safe" they could put some copy protection on the burned copy or limit the quality to 480p.

If they had HD movies for sale, I'd would be all over it...

Although I think it's cool that Apple is offering digital downloads of movies day and date - it will have to offer something more for me to purchase it - I want HD and extras. Make it compete against Blu-Ray, but right now it can't even compete with DVD, especially with what they are charging. After all, I got Cloverfield for $9.99 - with extras! Why would I pay $14.99 for it on iTunes?

Would rather buy the DVD. More flexible.

I can play the DVD in my living room and if I wanted to put it on an iPod I may get that has video, I could just rip it with Handbrake.

if people dont have enough time to go to a store and buy a dvd, how do they have enough time to watch a movie?

$15? I'm all for it if it's $10, Hi-Def, with Dolby Digital. I'm doubly for it if it were a $4.99 rental. But sadly, it's not, so I'm not.

Fifteen dollars? Apple must be losing their negotiating touch.