iTunes, Movies Anywhere, and SD

Daniel

There was a time when I had not yet embraced our digital-only future.

I still bought Blu-ray discs. Like a caveman, I would search through my mostly organized Blu-ray and DVD jewel cases, find a movie I wanted to watch, open the case, take the disc out, open the Blu-ray player, put the disc in the tray, close the tray, and wait.

When I put The Bourne Legacy’s disc into our Blu-ray player, it didn’t work. It wouldn’t play.

My wife wanted to watch The Bourne Legacy.

Our hero

The disc wasn’t playing.

I grabbed the jewel case, walked to the basement, opened iTunes or whatever obscure URL the coupon in The Bourne Legacy’s jewel case wanted me to open, and redeemed the code for the digital copy of The Bourne Legacy.

Then I walked back upstairs, changed the TV input to the Apple TV, and played the movie.

It was as if the disc worked.

But I could watch it on my phone. I could watch it in the basement without lugging the disc around (like a caveman).

A short time later, I went through all my DVDs and Blu-rays, looking for digital codes to redeem. Some had expired. Some had expired but worked anyway.

As I looked over my new iTunes movie library, I noticed that some of the films were HD and some were not. This was annoying and disappointing and would cause me to re-purchase some films in HD.

I believe I owned the following films on iTunes in SD format:

    Cowboys and Aliens
    Inception
    Jurassic Park
    Jurassic Park III
    Limitless
    The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
    Predators
    Prometheus
    Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Super 8
    Terminator Salvation
    The Town

Now, as of April 2018, I can only find the following SD films in my iTunes library on my up-to-date gen 3 Apple TV and on my up-to-date iPhone 7:

    Limitless
    Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
    Super 8

In iTunes on an up-to-date Mac, these films appear to be SD:

    Limitless
    The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
    Predators
    Super 8

The fact that two films are HD on two devices and SD on one seems like a bug to me.

(Technically I can find Inception in SD, but I later purchased it in HD. It appears twice in my library. I upgraded Prometheus, too, but the SD copy is no longer in my library.)

Limitless was distributed by Relativity Media. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Super 8 were both distributed by Paramount. What do these two film studios have in common? In what way would they be linked that is relevant in the 2018 digital film library landscape?

Movies Anywhere.

Name two film studios that aren’t participating in the Movies Anywhere initiative as of April 2018. Relativity and Paramount. Sure, there are others. I just don’t own any of their movies.

This makes me extremely curious. This is too much to be a coincidence.

The first thing I wonder is: If I were to buy an SD film on iTunes that is available in Movies Anywhere, would it show up in Movies Anywhere? Would it upgrade to HD in my iTunes library? Seems unlikely. Apple wouldn’t leave a loophole that big.

Are SD films upgraded to HD only if they were in a user’s iTunes library before Movies Anywhere started?

Here’s what I think is most likely: Apple/iTunes keeps track of which films a customer purchased on iTunes and which films a customer redeemed with a code. If a code redeemed an SD copy and that film becomes available in Movies Anywhere, it is upgraded to an HD copy.

If my theory is correct, the moment that Paramount or Relativity join into Movies Anywhere, I should have fewer SD films in my iTunes library.

iTunes, Movies Anywhere, and SD