and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Apple's new movie download store hit $1 million in about a week - over 125,000 downloads. Of course, that was with only 75 titles available, all of which were Disney releases. Will Steve Jobs be able to sucker the other movie houses into his little world? If he can, will people really want to watch their movies this way?

Sadly, the movies available are in a low-resolution format and the quality is, well, sub-par. What's worse is they're asking $14.99 a pop and this for:

a movie that is lower in quality than the DVD, lacks the special features, takes about an hour to download, and is basically unplayable on [a] television.

While I haven't downloaded a movie myself, anecdotal evidence suggests that the file size is in the range of two gigabytes.

Meanwhile, any mildly savvy computer user can get distributed bittorrent downloads of almost any recent movie in a format that is both decent quality and small enough to fit on CD. Are they stealing? Yes. Does this somehow feel "dirtier" or more "wrong" than stealing music? Certainly.

Historically, cassette tapes were cheap and easy to copy. When they first appeared on the market a revolution in music sharing was born. The equipment needed to copy a casette or record was fairly cheap as well, or at least something you would normally have in your household: a stereo.

Movies were saved from this early fate due to the simple fact that copying was not inexpensive enough. Multiple VCRs were required, there was always going to be some amount of quality lost, and the tapes themselves cost more.

The fact of the matter is now movies exist in the same world as music: small, cheap, easily portable. Nevermind the internet. If every VCR in 1985 had two decks to it, people would have been stealing movies then as well. Indeed they were, just not in the sort of numbers that people were stealing music.

The bottom line is that you gotta role with the times and the solution is certainly not to offer lesser-quality, more costly, and more difficult to acquire versions of your product. At $14.99, I can probably find almost anything on amazon.com in it's actual DVD form and, for the time it takes to download two gigs over my cable line (which is less than actual advertised speed, of course) I can get it shipped to my door.

Consumers are still human. Or perhaps I should say humans are still consumers. We still enjoy the feeling of a new product in our hands. We still like the packaging and the buying experience. To move us to a new model there has to be low barrier to entry (which I'd say they generally have - everyone has a computer and a credit card) but they also need to develop the proper expectations of quality and experience. It is not the consumer who has brought on these "new-improved" formats - High Definition TV and next-gen DVDs - it is the corporations in a bid to maintain their cyclic market of product replacement. Build newer formats, formats which are easily subject to damage, and continue to replace them over time, forcing the consumer to upgrade their collections of media. Yet when it comes time to offer online downloads they can't even offer old-world DVD quality? Again, they need to develop the proper experience and frankly, at $14.99, they just aren't doing that.

I'll be wildly surprised if the iTunes movie store is anywhere near as successful as it's music store in it's current form.