Exaggerated estimate
12 Nov 2006From Apple’s Quicktime Pro webpage:
Professional studios around the world spend millions of dollars and man-hours producing commercial entertainment. Please don’t steal their work or in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the theater [sic]. But, you can find lots of material on the Web that’s legal to cut, copy and remix. Look for the Creative Commons license and add to the world’s culture.
(2) Exaggerated estimate.
What. The.
It’s hard to tell whether they’re mocking the MPAA’s of the world or being serious. In which case, it’s great to see they’re being honest, but, again… what the?
Oh, and I still haven’t bought Quicktime Pro. I went there via their trailers site and saw this line in the footer: “Broken Movie icons? QuickTime 7 is now required to view Trailers- and it’s free.”
Clearly, Quicktime 7 isn’t free if you paid for 6. And, so far as I know, there’s no way to run multiple versions of Quicktime in tandem. So if you want to be able to view new generation content being created, you’re basically locked into a continual upgrade cycle. Which is a load of crap.
Also a load of crap is their Australian pricing for Quicktime Pro, which is $AU44 versus $US29 (about $AU38 at time of writing). The bits are identical. Don’t charge me more. I have foreign exchange transaction fees added to my card if I purchase something in a different currency, but it’s not anything near six dollars (try twenty cents or something ridiculously small). And it doesn’t cost you six dollars more to send an email to Australia instead of to your US customers.
I’m in this bizarre pseudo-closed-source land at the minute and I’m really fearful for the longevity of content sitting where I am now. In terms of relative openness, Apple aren’t looking too crash hot right at the minute…