iTunes Goes to the Movies

Disney may have been late to the party, but now that it's arrived, you can bet it's not going anywhere.

With Apple's announcement Tuesday that it will make 75 Walt Disney Co. films available for downloading via its iTunes Music Store, the house that the mouse built joins 20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM in the portable digital entertainment age.

As AOL Video, Fox and, most recently, Amazon.com rolled out plans in past weeks to offer downloadable movies at $9.99 to $19.99 a pop, Disney was conspicuously absent from the list of studios making content available.

Of course, that's not a surprise, considering the films available from these new services can only be watched on computers and portable devices compatible with Microsoft Windows Media Player software--and Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs is the largest individual Disney shareholder.

But now you can catch films from Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar, Touchstone and Miramax on iTunes and then tote them around on your video iPod. Library titles such as Shakespeare in Love, Finding Nemo, The Rock and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl will go for $9.99 apiece, while new releases will be available for $12.99 the same day they come out on DVD. The price of those films will then go up to $14.99 after their first week out of the gate.

"Here we go again! First music, then TV shows, and now movies," Jobs said in a statement. "In less than one year we've grown from offering just five TV shows to offering over 220 TV shows, and we hope to do the same with movies. iTunes is selling over one million videos a week, and we hope to match this with movies in less than a year."

Last October, ABC's Lost and Desperate Housewives were two of the first TV series in the iTunes library, and today the online store offers content from more than 40 networks. And, for footnote purposes, the service has also sold 1.5 billion song downloads since its launch in April 2003.

"ABC and Disney Channel were the first networks to offer television programming on iTunes, and we're once again breaking new ground as the Walt Disney Studios becomes the first to debut feature films on the iTunes platform," Walt Disney Company president and CEO Robert Iger said.

While Apple continues to dominate the portable media market with its über-popular line of iPods (which will soon include an iPod shuffle that measures in at a half-inch cube and a top of the line iPod that can hold more than 100 hours of video), its competitors have not been sitting idly by.

The unveiling of Amazon Unbox last Friday means that digital video fans can now trek to Amazon.com for their TV and movie-downloading needs (minus Disney content, of course). Episodes of series ranging from South Park to CSI are available for $1.99 per episode, while films both old and revered (Ben Hur) and new and reviled (Rumor Has ItÂ?) are typically priced between $7.99 and $14.99.

At press time, however, Syriana appears to be selling for $15.99.

"Customers are not DVD lovers or download lovers," Bill Carr, Amazon's VP of digital media, said last week. "They're movie lovers and TV lovers. Then what we can do is offer choice."

What Amazon also has going for it right off the bat is the power of suggestion. When you buy a book, CD or DVD from Amazon.com, upon your next visit to the mega shopping site you're greeted with a tip as to what you might enjoy next. So perhaps purchasing a set of Friends DVDs will lead you to download an episode of Coupling (the original hit BBC show, not the failed American version).

Why not? The memory in your new iPod isn't going to fill itself.