Media Here and Now

Most people will tell you that they’re lazy. I know, that’s shocking, but lets look at the facts. Most people want things as quickly and easily as possible. This means, ordering out, renting a movie, and downloading songs.

Wait a second, downloading songs? It’s pretty much accepted that downloading music from sites you don’t pay for is illegal, especially if it’s from limewire/bittorrent. Lots of people are even starting to figure out how to download tv shows and movies this way. But what’s the fix? The fix is to make pay for media easier to access than content you don’t have to pay for. There’s one company that’s ahead of the gang, and that’s Apple.

As you may or may not know, the iPhone and iPod touch both have a built in iTunes store, which you can browse and buy songs and albums, usually cheaper than you can get it from a brick and mortar store (albeit in lower quality, and a lot of times DRM’d). Before you throw your hands up in the air, and denounce iTunes for carrying DRM music, lets remember that Apple is trying to move away from DRM, and pushing up the quality of the songs… at the same price. So far, only indie labels and EMI have jumped on board, but I believe there’s a big push in some consumer markets against DRM. The accessibility of music using my iPod and iTunes now makes it easier to obtain music, sometimes easier than it would be if you ‘acquired it’ through other means.

Now that music is available, what’s next? Apple has been providing movie rents in the United States for a while now, and soon it’s rumoured that it will arrive in Canada. In fact, now that you can rent or buy a movie without leaving your computer is a big bonus. iTunes currently rents both standard and HD movies, and probably delivers them faster than what you could get them from bittorrent, and at prices cheaper than you can rent them from a store like Blockbuster. In the case of movie rents, you have to worry about DRM… or do you? Most rental stores require that the movie be returned by a certain date/time, which is what DRM accomplishes, and to be able to order the movie, you’ve got to have iTunes anyways, so DRM is not that big of an issue in this sense. You’re renting the movie, not buying it.

When you rent a movie, you get the added bonus of being able to watch it on your iPod. This means I can rent a movie for a flight and watch it without having to worry about figuring out how to reencode the video. People that don’t want to use iTunes at all, can still enjoy watching and purchasing media with an AppleTV. AppleTV is a sleek little set top box device, which you can think of like a DVD player, only digital and high definition. If you do in fact have another computer running iTunes, you can stream music to the AppleTV, much like you can stream songs between iTunes clients, so you can have full access to your music and movie library from your couch, which is were most people would want to listen to music. The AppleTV features both component and HDMI connectors to your TV, as well as analog and digital sound (for 7.1 goodness). What’s more to like?

The only downside to using iTunes, is that it’s available only on Windows and Mac, which is solved by dual booting. Unfortunately, those on Linux are left out until the Wine project can get iTunes working and watching movies, those with iPhones and iPod touches have to resort to jailbreaking to sync.