Digital copies, why?

[EricJ]

Originally Posted by Kynch

You never saw DVDs come with a "Bonus VHS Copy of the Movie!".

I know some people'll bring out the "What about a DVD copy for the children to watch?" argument. But since I don't have any yet, I still think that you shouldn't be charged extra fsuch as Digital Copies and DVD copies of movies. Or if it's simply unavoidable, put the digital copy on the DVD or put a flyer in the case to download the movie online.

Well, that's just it, y'see:
The DVD Copy didn't start as "For your kids"--It started out with Disney giving you a "safe" copy of Sleeping Beauty along with the Blu-Ray that you could watch now, just in case you hadn't bought your $400 player yet by the time the disk was retired in January '10...And they didn't want more "Mean ol' Walt put it back in the Vault, and they didn't let us buy one! " whiners like that dopey SNL sketch.
It was meant to be Handicap Access...It was meant to be a PUBLIC SERVICE, trying to avoid all the PR problems that arose when Bambi, Pinocchio and Fantasia were retired the first time.

It was a good idea. The average mainstream whitebread non-Blu owners were supposed to pick up on it.
And because all the Blu buyers grabbed onto the idea first, and said "Wow, a DVD for me? Thanks!", the audience it was meant for just couldn't get it through their freakin' skulls!
(They put the Snow White Blu in a DVD box, fer rice cakes, and it STILL DIDN'T WORK!!!!!!!!!!!)

Okay--That's the History lesson for why we have DVD copies.
Now keep your lesson book open for why we have Digital copies:

Steve Jobs came up with the idea, you see. He thought, hey, people are going to use these new iPods with video, why not get studios together and cross-promote their movies by offering the DC files as a bonus on the disks?
The studios scoffed cruelly. "Scoff, scoff", they scoffed, "our disks are meant for real extras; why should we give our movies away to watch on gadgets, when we're trying to sell home theater?
So poor Steve took his little iRan sneakers, trudged back to Cupertino, and invented the iTunes Store all by himself, where studios (well, just Disney for now, anyway, since he owned the studio) could license soft copies of their movies for download, and users could fill their hungry lil' iPods that didn't have any video yet on them. You probably know what happened to that idea.

After a while, every studio noticed Steve's idea was catching on, beat a path to his door, and finally you could buy other movies and TV shows besides Disney and ABC.
And all was happy...Well, not quite: There was that little matter that every movie and every TV show had the same price. Which meant that studios couldn't make as much money as they wanted to in their imaginations, and they couldn't charge any more for "GI Joe" than they could for just a plain ol' vault movie.
So Sony--who still believed that Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" would still crush the iPod someday--came up with a neat idea: Hey, teen gang...What if we put a WMV compatible movie file right on our disks! That way, fans would still have to pay the full $29 purchase price for the hard disks anyway, and we might sell some more of these-here Zune players! (Gad!--Where do they come up with these inspirations? )
Fox and Warner--still trying to do something with those Amazon downloads that were going to crush the iTunes Store--quickly followed suit, and after a few years of working out the bugs, realized that everyone really did have an iPod anyway.

There, now....Do we feel smarter than we did before?
Please bookmark this post for future reference, the next time we get this exact same thread three to six months later by the clock.