Apple and Amazon Video On Demand have started rival promotions this week on digital movie and TV downloads, offering movies for under $5 USD and offering rentals for .99.
New digital films will also cost $14.99 at Amazon now, a discount from their previous $16.99 price tag, and occasionally cheaper than their physical media counterparts.
As an example, both sites have slashed the price of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a May release, to $9.99 USD, while the DVD sells for $15 and the Blu-ray for $25.
Most competitors, such as CinemaNow and VUDU, offer new releases for over $17 USD.
FutureSource analyst David Sidebottom adds that Amazon has been trying to steal iTunes market share in the music market, with aggressive pricing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same on the video side.”
The best deals, however, are on TV shows, with over 9 full seasons of popular shows available for under $5 USD.
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VUDU has added 60 Disney films to its online movie download catalog, marking the first time those films are available online for purchase, legally, in HD.
The movies range from “No Country for Old Men” to “High School Musical.”
Competitors such as the mighty Apple iTunes only offers Disney’s catalog for purchase in SD and rental in HD.
The videos will be available in VUDU’s special own HDX format and in regular 720p, each with 5.1 surround sound.
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Although Steve Jobs has said official internal Blu-ray drives will not be heading to Macs anytime soon, Other World Computing (OWC) has announced the launch of its Mercury Pro Blu-ray external Blu-ray burner which features a quad interface that will allow it to connect to Macs.
The OWC can connect via USB 2.0, FireWire 400, Firewire 800, or eSATA to Macs or PCs and will write BD-R or BD-RE, single layer and dual layer at 4x.
The drive can also notably burn HD DVDs, DVDs and CDs and will work with a myriad of software including Apple iTunes, Apple iDVD 5, Apple Disc Burner, Apple DVD Studio Pro, NTI DragonBurn, Roxio Toast, Roxio Easy Media Creator, and Nero.
The drive is set to ship later this month for $499.99 USD alone or $579.99 USD with Roxio Toast 9 Titanium for Mac OS X.
