My First iTunes Movie Purchase

I was going through my “Newsletters” email folder (where I filter everything that comes from all sorts of websites that want to send me “Special Offers”) and saw the “No Country for Old Men” was available.

At first I thought it was just going to be the soundtrack, but then I realized that it was the movie.

I was planning to see the movie tomorrow at a theater. My wife and son would go see something else.

So do I want to pay $7 to see the movie once, or $15 to own it?

Given that I thought it would be awfully nice to be able to go with my wife and son to whatever they were going to see, plus my wife and I could watch the movie together later if we wanted to (after I had watched it to see if she would like it), $15 seemed like a good deal.

Plus – hey, how simple is this! – I can just download it right to my laptop! If I want to watch it on my MacBook, I could do that, if I want to watch it on the AppleTV I could do that. I could presumably even start it on the AppleTV tonight and then take it with me to the hotel tomorrow and finish it there.

So I downloaded it. It took about 40 minutes with my office DSL (would have been much much much longer on my satellite connection at home). The first part of it went really fast, then it slowed way down, then I got it to speed up by connecting right to my DSL modem rather than going through the router.

I watched it, and enjoyed it. It’s a great movie, obviously, it won a bunch of awards. This really isn’t about that.

When I got home and told Tracey about it, she said “Yeah, it came out on Tuesday.” Immediately I had several thoughts:

1) I probably could have stopped at Blockbuster and rented it for a week for $5 (even though it’s a “New Release” they give you 2 days + a week grace period).

2) I probably could have stopped at Wal-Mart and bought the DVD.

I decided to watch it on my iMac. It has a nicer screen than our TV and I’ve got a very comfy chair in that room too. As soon as I started watching it I found the first limitation.

I wanted to turn on the closed captioning/subtitles.

Except that there aren’t any. Not in the iTunes version at least. iTunes itself has subtitle support, but the movie didn’t have any subtitles encoded apparently.

Why would I need subtitles if I’m not deaf? Well, sometimes what people say isn’t clear. I just prefer it. Plus, I like the option.

Secondly, I realized soon that this wasn’t a movie Tracey would ever want to watch (for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the movie). But I really would have liked to have watched the “Bonus Features.”

Except there aren’t any. The download is just the download.

Had I rented the DVD or bought it, I would have gotten some extras:

“Working With The Coens: Reflections Of Cast And Crew”; “The Making Of ‘No Country For Old Men’”; “Diary Of A Country Sheriff”, Featurette.

I guess there’s no commentary track available. Not surprising, I guess. But some of them might have been interesting. I’ll never know.

I checked Wal-Mart’s webpage and found that Wal-Mart sells the DVD for $15.87 which is $0.88 more than I paid for it.

For $0.88 I would have had a copy of the movie that had all the extras, that I could have watched on my laptop (which has a DVD player), or on our TV (which has a DVD player in addition to an AppleTV), or on my iMac (which also has a DVD player. I also could have decided that I didn’t want to keep the movie and given it away to a friend, or to our local library. I could have even gone down to FYE and sold it to them as a used DVD and probably gotten $3-5 for it.

I’m no fan of stopping at Wal-Mart, but I probably could have done that in the time it took me to download the movie from iTunes. Ditto with renting it, which would have been $5-$6 at the most.

Will I ever buy another movie from the iTunes Movie Store? I doubt it. I’m not really getting my money’s worth. It doesn’t really save me all that much time (I could definitely drive from home to Wal-Mart and back again in the time it would take me to download the movie over my satellite connection). It’s really not all that much more convenient, given that all of my devices (TV, MacBook, iMac) already have DVD players. It’s not cheaper.

How could the MPAA / Apple get me to download more movies? Let me own the movie for about $8. Admit that they are saving on having to package the DVD, ship the DVD, etc. Admit that it costs them next to nothing to get it to me, and give me some recompense for the fact that I know own a limited copy of the movie without any extras which can only be played on certain devices.

Otherwise I can see a whole lot of decisions going like this:

“Cool, I’d like to own that. Yeah, but I can get it for the same price at Amazon or Wal-Mart. I don’t want to go to Wal-Mart tonight. I’ll just do it next time I’m there.”

I will, of course, probably forget before then. The moment will pass.

Want to capitalize on that impulse buy that you got tonight?

“Hey, cool, I wanted to see that. Hey, for $8 I can own a copy of the movie, and it will save me from having to go to Wal-Mart. The bonus features probably wouldn’t have been that good anyway. BUY NOW.”

The biggest barrier to doing this?

The MPAA’s greed.

They don’t want to do anything cheaper. If you’re used to paying $15 for something they have to package and ship and they can reduce their costs and still get $15 for it, that’s money in their pockets, and they want that

(I was actually surprised to see that No Country for Old Men was available for sale, not just rental. Rental is a bad deal right now. You rent it, but you might not be able to watch it. Or you might be able to start it, but not finish it. But that’s another topic.)

The only potentially bigger barrier than the MPAA’s greed? Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart isn’t going to be happy if you start eating into their DVD sales because I can buy the same $15 movie for $8.

Buying movies on iTunes is very easy.

It is not a good deal (pay more for less), and I’m not convinced that it actually saves time. And what you’re left with (a digital copy tied to specific devices: computers, iPhones, iPods with Video, AppleTV) isn’t as good as what you’d get with a DVD.

No Country for Old Men is a great movie. It was my first iTunes Movie purchase.

Probably also my last.