It certainly seems so given this story from Variety:
After conquering the digital music biz and taking the lead with TV shows online, Apple is looking to feature films.The computer company is in active negotiations with most major studios to add movies to its iTunes Music Store, most likely by the end of the year, numerous sources confirm.
The main sticking point is price.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has been personally involved in the talks, initially proposed selling all films at a flat price of $9.99 — an offer the studios flatly rejected.
“We can’t be put in a position where we lose the ability to price our most popular content higher than less popular stuff,” said a studio exec close to the negotiations.
And Hollywood may just have the market clout to force Jobs to agree to their terms:
When it came to songs and TV shows, Apple was largely defining a new market, as they hadn’t been sold individually before. But feature films already are sold on DVD at varying wholesale prices depending on whether they’re new releases or library titles.
While the homevideo market is slumping — leading many studios to focus on the Internet as the next growth market — it still generated $23 billion in the U.S. last year, and studios don’t want to risk angering major retailers like Wal-Mart or Best Buy by giving better terms to Apple.
Online retailers Movielink and CinemaNow are paying DVD wholesale prices to get digital copies.
There are signs Apple may bend, insiders say, and allow price points ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 in order to differentiate older titles from new releases.
Twenty bucks for a downloadable movie ? Well, it depends what replay and copying restrictions the studios persuade Apple to agree to. Without some degree of effort, you can’t copy a DVD and I’m sure the studios will want to make it as difficult as possible for the iTunes copy of Superman Returns to be distributed without their knowledge or consent.
