Given the announcement yesterday of the "movie" offerings now in Itunes I decided that I should experiment to see what the end user download experience was like.
I work at a research institute which was built on a firm embrace of the power of fiber and light for data tranmission so our desktop network speeds are very decent. I did a quick bandwidth test to see what my download speeds were like this morning and it was 23273kb sec.
Next I downloaded and installed the new version of Itunes, went to the apple store, and began to browse their movie offerings. I must say given the craziness of the fakeumentary on 9-11 on ABC, owned by Disney, I almost stopped my test due to the fact that the only films are Disney and I'm officially boycotting them for the moment. However, in the name of science I persisted.
I found the film O Brother Where Art Thou and decided it was worth the $9.99 being asked for direct download. The file itself was 1.25gb in size and had an estimated download time of 6 minutes. I started my download at 8:03am and was complete by 8:09am which put there estimate right on target. Once downloaded the file must be "processed" before being able to be viewed. My guess is the 1.25gb is a compressed file and this is the decompression phase. It took roughly about 30 seconds.
Video quality is "ok" but not great on the computer screen. The image itself just isn't as crisp as I would like and my hankering is it has been optimized for video display on the video ipod.
So...here are my commments:
1) Download worked fine, network estimate was on target, big pipes (or tubes Senator) really help here.
2) Video playback on laptop wasn't great but would do for an airplane.
3) When oh When is the real Video Ipod coming out so I might consider really buying films here ?
