I’d Be Into Streaming iTunes Video As Well
Apple Insider has a juicy rumor that Apple is wrapping up development of a streaming video solution for the iTunes Store. MG Siegler over at Venture Beat follows up, pointing out this service would be much appreciated due to the sometimes prohibitively large amount of space video downloads from iTunes requires.
I’ll just chime in and say I’ve run into the same situation as MG, what with season passes for Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, and my wife’s Grey’s Anatomy. That amount of video won’t fit on our Apple TV, and therefore, I’ve been using the Mac Mini to download television shows, with moving the iTunes library stored on an external hard drive.
Meanwhile, I much prefer the set up with the Netflix / Roku box which I’ve written endless praises about, mostly because this whole storage situation is non-existent. All the video content streams, and it just works, period. I don’t have to do any file management because there are no files. The same goes for Hulu on Boxee on the Apple TV.
I have found that while I definitely have the desire to own music files, I don’t really have that same desire with movies, above and beyond a small library of 5 star movies. The vast majority are in that watch once, delete the file mode, which explains why video stores were so popular. So streaming, personally, is just another step in that direction.
So I put my vote in for streaming video. But what I’m really hoping is Apple has some sort of subscription plan in the works — say you pay a monthly fee and have access to all the video content in the iTunes Store, streaming. I’d actually pay up to $20 or even $30 a month for such a deal, and I’d even sacrifice HD quality for depth of content. We’ll see — fingers crossed.
Subscription would be nice, but probably unlikely. But still, I’d love to pay $50 to $100 a year to have iTunes store all my movies remotely. I’m running my entire iTunes library now from the 1TB external, which isn’t so bad, but can take a few seconds longer than normal to load everything and is just another thing sitting on my desk.
I’d also love the ability to rent TV shows for some price cheaper than the purchasing price. I simply don’t want to own every episode of every show that I watch, yet Apple makes me. Not sure how good of a strategy that is long-term versus something like Hulu.
Yeah, nearly forgot about the lack of ability for renting television shows. With that rental window, renting TV shows makes even more sense since I’d surely be able to get through one episode in a day.
The online storage possibility has me wondering if I could put an iTunes movie up on my iDisk and play it from there
i like streaming videos but same time i fear the virus that are crazy to occupy my system. if i have some tips to get rid of that would be more better to download more movies.
[…] that Apple is moving away from locally stored, downloaded content and toward streaming model. I prefer streaming as it does away with space running out, file management, and frankly, a lot of video content […]