Why Hasn’t Apple Released 720p Movies on iTunes Yet?

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I got back to thinking about AppleTV this morning after I read A week with AppleTV: A Review on PVRblog.com. This cool little set-top box is designed to stream video content from your iTunes account to your HD television. It supports 720p resolution out-of-the-box, but most of the video content available on iTunes is only available in 480p. The question on my mind, and on the minds of most other gadget bloggers lately is: Why isn’t iTunes hosting movies and videos in 720p yet?

The rub seems to be the file sizes of 720p content. According to 43 Folders’ latest article about this issue, a two-hour movie in 720p format weighs in at about four Gigabytes. This file would take up over 10 percent of the usable space of the current AppleTV model, and take a non-trivial amount of time to download. (Do the math using the effective throughput of your own broadband connection.)

The comments attached to the 43 Folders article are just about as good as the article itself. They raise a number of questions about whether residential DSL services will be adequate for the amount of downloading that people may want to do once iTunes starts providing lots of 720p content. Throughput aside, some residential DSL plans place monthly caps on downloads. If you have a 40-Gigabyte download cap, that would mean you could only grab about 20 hours of 720p content per month before your provider would start complaining to you.

The other thought that came up on 43 Folders was that AppleTV would create a boom in video podcasts available in the 720p format. I can see services like NHL Network and Cycling.tv being beneficiaries of devices like AppleTV and the PlayStation 3 video download capabilities.

I also wonder how long it will be before iTunes and other similar services are extended to provide live or nearly-live video on demand?


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