May Contain Nuts

There’s a rumor going around that Apple is set to announce a subscription-based music service for iTunes at their “Rock On” Super Awesome Event of Super Awesomeness next week.  It’s probably not true, but I figured I’d toss my hat into the ring of commentators on the idea.

As the sole way of acquiring music from an online distributor, subscription services suck.  They just do.  As soon as you stop paying, all of the stuff you’ve paid for suddenly goes away, and That’s Badâ„¢.  However, such services do have the advantage of allowing you to be incredibly liberal in sampling music, because you’re more likely to spend $5/month, download 10 albums, and maybe like/keep 2 of them than you are to pay $9.99 for each of those same albums, and suddenly find yourself out $80 because you only liked 2 of them enough to keep around.  From the perspective of someone who likes to hear more than the 30-second clips on iTunes before buying a track or full album (which often aren’t very representative of the full track), a subscription service would be likely to expose me to more music that I’d be willing to pay for.

The rumored iTunes Unlimited service, while just a tad on the pricey side, would ultimately be the best of both worlds, because as I understand it, you can “rent” anything in the music store with your subscription, and then buy it outright if you really like it and want to keep it.  Theoretically if your Unlimited subscription were ever canceled, you’d still own all of the music you coughed up the extra cash for, and That’s Goodâ„¢.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d really be able to get my money’s worth out of a subscription though, so I don’t know if I’d swing for it, but of all the subscription services available, Apple’s seems like it would actually make the most sense (plus it would work with Macs and iPods, so there’s another plus…).

What I’d really like to see, though, is a Netflix-like subscription service for the video section of the store that runs on the same principle.  You pay $X each month, and get to rent whatever you want from the video store - TV shows and movies, but not music videos - to watch once.  If you really like a certain video, you can go ahead and buy it at the full or nearly-full price and own it outright.  I could easily see a tiered service being put in place with either per-month limits, limits on how many items you can have rented at a time (watching something will allow you to rent something else) with no time limits, or both (which would be the most restrictive and really suck).  Still, I’d probably end up frequenting the iTunes video store a lot more if I could pay, say, $5 or even $10 a month and be able to rent as many movies/shows as I wanted (or n movies/shows with a tiered service) for a flat fee.  Anything I’ve rented, seen once (as would be the limitation), and want to keep, I can purchase and watch an unlimited number of times with the same FairPlay restrictions as other videos from the store currently have.  With something like this, who would need cable (well, except for NBC/Universal shows, because they’re whiny little bastards)?

This brings me to my next point, which is AppleTV and Hulu.  I’m still very seriously wanting to get an AppleTV, if only because the Dell currently attached to the TV doesn’t have enough horsepower to do very smooth h.264 video playback (full-screen or windowed), and half of the stuff I own is in h.264 (this problem is especially noticable in iTunes for some reason).  The other reason, which will factor into my comments on Hulu momentarily, is that watching stuff on TV is a lot nicer than watching stuff on a computer, and while I have a computer attached to the TV, it’s not exactly a convenient experience, what with the keyboard and mouse requirements.

Now, having an AppleTV would be great, and I could (for the most part) ditch the Dell as a result, but AppleTV doesn’t support Hulu, and for as much as I swore up and down that I wasn’t going to frequent the service, it’s damned tolerable (the occasionally shoddy commercial breakpoints and tendency to run the same ad 6 times during a 1-hour show can be grating).  As I understand it, Hulu’s video is also in h.264 (since Flash supports it now), so it’s not like the AppleTV would need to break down its ivory codec tower to support it.  Of course, it would probably require Apple to make a deal with NBC/Universal, which seems unlikely to happen given the blame game they played when NBC left iTunes.  Still, I think if you’re going to have streaming web video content on your device, Hulu is a far better place to get it from than YouTube (know how many times I’ve used the YouTube app on my iPod in the past 9 months?  Probably 5, and all of them were to look up Jonathan Coulton videos).  What I’m getting at is that I would absolutely love to see a Hulu app on the AppleTV, ideally provided by Apple so I don’t have to figure out how to hack it (though I would probably be willing to pay for one that was high-quality even if it did require hacking my device).

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Alahmnetcetera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.