[v_dogg @ Apr 10th 2007 11:52PM]

thats what ive never understood. why make apple tvs but sell crappy movies on itunes that look like crap on your hdtv.

[Michael La Framboise @ Apr 11th 2007 12:11AM]

I would say its because of two reasons; first of all, the amount of space HD content takes up - to me it seems like Apple is trying to do the same thing with movies as they did with music; they're trying to get you to start collecting and organizing it, and if they were to give you full res HD content, then they would run into the exact same problem as Microsoft did w/ the Xbox 360 - tons of high quality content, but not only does it take like a day to download your HD movie, but you can't even fit more then 2-3 full length movies onto your hard drive.

That takes you to the second issue, downloading that content. A full length HD movie would be what? at-least 15 gigs? - maybe with good compression, you could take it down to 10; but still -- given that most people that use "broadband" internet have DSL - I doubt anyone would want to wait for days for their movies to download. But then take the movies from the iTunes store; you click download; and by the time you make popcorn and etc - it already downloads at-least 5% of your movie, and you can start watching it right then and there, when you want to watch it, not a week later when any desire you had is long gone.

But as time goes on and larger hard drives appear, and internet speeds improve, I would bet that Apple will start offering all their video content in HD.