How to Get Cheap Movies on iTunes

By Jim on November 16th, 2008

It’s nice to see iTunes finally getting creative in selling movies. Now you can get very cheap “movies of the week” right on iTunes for around $5.

The glory days of grabbing that $5 DVD at the road trip pit-stop or Target checkout counter have finally made their digital transition to the iTunes Store.

With a new section unfortunately called “This Week’s Great Movies Under $5″ (iTunes link), a set of movies will be offered for purchase each week for… well, $5 (interestingly, they can still be rented at the regular $2.99 price). This first—and small—batch of movies is a bit older, most of them being on the action side of the store. There is also a strong Schwarzenegger presence this week with titles like 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day (which leads the pack as the “Movie of the Week”), 1993’s The Last Action Hero, and 1984’s The Karate Kid—all three movies which I’m downloading as I write this.

It’s not a bad deal but it doesn’t look like they are in HD. Seems like it’s just SD versions. Maybe I’m nitpicking here but it seems to me that Apple ought to change this pricing a little bit. Make the SD version $3.99 and the HD version $4.99.

Yeah, I know…some of the movies are as old as the hills but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people out there who haven’t seen them or who might want to add them to a movie collection. It would be nice if Apple considered adding HD versions. At this point I really have no interest in owning SD versions of movies. A 720P HD version would be so sweet at a $4.99 price point.

Am I being too greedy here? Expecting too much?