A NYTimes blog reports that Jeff Bewkes, Time Warners chief executive, revealed that Warner Brothers will now release "on demand" videos (including iTunes rentals) on the same day as the DVD release. Historically, on-demand releases have tended to lag behind DVD releases by 30-45 days to avoid sales cannibalization.
When Steve Jobs announced the iTunes Rental store at Macworld this year, he acknowledged that the rentals would appear about 30 days after the DVD release. We later noticed, however, that some iTunes movie rentals had started appearing much earlier than the expected 30-day delay. As it turns out, Warner Brothers was experimenting with this approach for the last few months, and found that DVD rentals only fell by 3-5 percent while DVD sales actually increased when on-demand videos were offered earlier.
Mr. Bewkes boasted to investors that the shift from DVDs to digital distribution, on the "day and date" of DVD release, will be better for Warner Brothers because it will eliminate some of the costs of manufacturing and distributing discs.
This shift, of course, is good for customers who are given more flexibility in purchasing video content.
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Saturday April 27, 2024 12:41 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...