Roger Fingas
A significant gap in Tuesday's announcement of 4K movies coming to iTunes was Disney, normally one of Apple's closest corporate partners.
Most major studios, such as Universal and Warner Bros., are otherwise onboard for the deal, the Wall Street Journal noted. In a coup for Apple, participating firms have agreed to sell 4K movies for the same price as 1080p copies, and upgrade iTunes users' existing libraries at no extra cost.
Disney offers 4K video on other digital platforms such as Vudu, suggesting that the problem isn't with a lack of material, or a push for people to buy Blu-ray discs.
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was once in charge of Pixar, which was bought by Disney and turned Jobs into Disney's most powerful individual shareholder. Apple has often highlighted Disney content in marketing, especially in relation to iTunes, and Disney CEO Bob Iger now sits on the Apple board of directors.
One possibility is that negotiations are simply still ongoing, and might even be resolved by the time the Apple TV 4K ships on Sept. 22. The set-top will support 4K and HDR video, and upgrade to an A10X processor like the one used in this year's iPad Pros.
Andrew Orr
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
20 Comments
Your statement about Disney offering 4K content on other digital platforms is incredible misleading. To date, Disney has only released one (1) title in 4K (Guardians of the Galaxy 2) from any of their studio brands. All of the other Marvel stuff like Spiderman you see on services like Vudu is not produced by Disney but by other studios like Sony Pictures who acquired the movie rights to those characters before Disney acquired Marvel. It would not make sense to have Disney as a marquee partner for AppleTv 4K and then they only have one title.
I doubt they are still negotiating. What would they say? Apple: Same price. Disney: No. Apple: Yes. Disney: No. And so on. But I guess now that others are doing it for the same price as HD, Disney won't risk looking greedy with higher prices. It actually doesn't cost the studios more because they've already shot the film, it's just a matter of processing 1 file per movie into the appropriate format, it actually costs Apple more because it's their servers that will host these larger files.
Pretty awesome that people get a free upgrade to 4K from there original purchased videos on the iTunes Store, but with sites like VUDU selling them for $29.99 for the higher resolution, hopefully Apple gets this fixed so both don't charge for the higher quality which is total BS.If not other sites are going to loose business as people go with Apple instead. It doesn't matter how much it costs, Apple sure can afford it.
Disney doesn't have much 4K content. Right now it's just Guardians of the Galaxy 2 with Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales next up. So I don't find Disney holding out as an issue right now. I do expect them to come on board eventually. Disney's a little slow with 4K. As it is you can't even buy 4K movies via thier movie club, you have to
go to 3rd party retailers.
Edit: They added Guardians 4K to the movie club but still don't offer Pirates