“Enough said. Microsoft lost the battle in the consumer entertainment media space.:
That’s Mauricio Freitas – Microsoft MVP and fan – in response to iTunes offering videos in New Zealand and Australia.
There’s a critical flaw however. iTunes got big through usability, but most importantly because it made it easy to transfer your CD’s to songs on the computer and iPod. Imagine making do with only the songs that you have purchased from iTunes.
It’s the same with movies. I own a bunch of DVD’s – collected from a variety of countries over the years. iTunes needs to provide me with the ability to rip, catalogue and store (e.g. across multiple hard drives) these.
It is technically not a real challenge for the likes of Apple. It’s the legal stuff that are the issue.
Sony actually has the best play here – if they “got it” they’d release their Sony movies from copyright restrictions for personal use, and provide a decent “iTunes” and hardware to play them on.
Meanwhile I’m waiting for the consumer class application that just works for movies, that lets me rip DRM free, store across multiple devices, play on my Apple TV, and run on my mac. All without thinking.
Lance Wiggs 