Digital Copy
I’ve noticed that quite a few movies these days are coming out as a Blu-ray+DVD+Digital Copy now — I just picked up a copy of Up at Target for $20, for example. I think this is a really smart way for the studios to get people to upgrade to Blu-ray. Right now, I happen to own two movies on Blu-ray, but no player yet. I hadn’t really thought about buying a Blu-ray player before now, but with a growing collection and cheaper players, I just might now.
But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about at the moment. The other interesting part of the combo is the Digital Copy part. Basically, it boils down to a code to download a copy in iTunes. In fact, that’s exactly how it was done for the first Blu-ray movie we purchased. But for Up, Disney went and bundled in a 4th disc in the package for the Digital Copy. For someone on a decently fast Internet connection like myself, it really didn’t do anything to have a copy on a disc. But for people who may be suffering with slower connections, this seemed like a pretty good idea.
Except that’s not how it worked. Once I put the disc in the drive, iTunes opened up to a special page asking for the code that came with my copy of Up. Once I entered it, iTunes then proceeded to download the entire movie over the Internet, ignoring the 1.1GB file that was on the DVD I had just inserted.
Seems like there is still some work to be done on this — considering that all the disc did was launch iTunes, it seems a lot more wasteful this way. I also suspect that the activation code could’ve been entered directly into iTunes and I could’ve just bypassed this silly process all together.
At least the movie industry is starting to warm up to the idea of people wanting to play movies on their portable devices without charging them extra for the option. It’s things like this that might actually lead to more people purchasing content from them because it doesn’t feel like a money grab on the part of the studios.
Now if they would just warm up to the idea of getting rid of DRM like the music industry did…
