Apple Needs a Disc to Digital
Apple. I love you. I’ve become a total Apple fanboy. This post is written from my Macbook Pro, while I have the Apple TV on streaming one of my multitudes of movies. But, Apple, you’re letting Walmart get the better of you, and that’s not good.
Vudu.com, Walmart’s own digital Ultraviolet outlet, has been running a program for years under its “Disc to Digital” program. Now, as I understood the program when it started, you could go into a Walmart store and trade in your disc, pay a couple bucks, and you would have a digital copy of the movie available in your Vudu Ultraviolet library. Pretty cool? Not really. At the time, Ultraviolet was terrible. It was splintered with the various providers (Flixster, Vudu, CinemaNow, etc.). Half the time the files wouldn’t show up even with the codes, and about half the time I had to email to indicate my codes didn’t work. It sucked. Moreover, just about the only outlet to watch was to watch on a laptop or desktop computer. I didn’t buy a big HDTV to watch stuff on a laptop, right?
But it got better. The various Ultraviolet platforms linked. Roku and streaming TVs made it possible to watch the digital HD videos in, you know, actual HD on a TV.
Now, I have last-gen Apple TVs on all my TVs in my house. I can stream my entire iTunes digital collection to those TVs, which is great. As you can tell from this blog, I like movies, and I tend to buy a lot of them. My iTunes digital collection has 100 movies and a few TV shows. My overall library is well over 500 physical discs.
Here’s where the predicament comes in. If I’m out on the deck and I want to watch something, I’m limited to what I have streaming as I have no physical disc player out there. (Yes, there’s Netflix and Hulu too, but that isn’t the point, dammit). If I’m in my bedroom, I can come downstairs and find a disc to pop into the PS3, but it’s a pain.
Vudu has its disc to digital program, which sounds great. I could scan the bar code of just about anything in my collection, and for $2, I could have a digital copy of ANY blu-ray I already own. For $5 I could even buy an upgraded HD copy of any of the old DVDs I have.
There are movies I own that I’d love to have available for streaming. Vudu could make that happen for many of them. But, I’m all-in with Apple’s iTunes ecosystem. So, what’s that mean? Is this the last nail in the coffin before I jump to a Roku with 4K capability? If I do, what about all those iTunes movies I own?
Apple, look, I get that the fanboys pay you shitloads of money. I’ve done it. But I’m not about to pay you $20 to get a digital copy of Iron Man (the only Marvel movie not to come with a digital copy with the blu-ray). Maybe some people will, but I’m not one of them. I would, however, drop a few bucks a flick in order to populate my digital library with certain things from my physical collection that I would find it much more convenient to own digitally.
Apple, there are lots of us who would pay $2 or so to get a digital copy of the blu rays we already own. Let’s get something like this going, ok?
