gmwedding
join:2005-02-14
Elk Grove, CA
| RE: Netflix: the key words are "at this point."
Online movie and Blu-ray sales are just getting started. The iPod and iTunes were minor players for a year after Apple's late start in music back in 2001. We'll have to wait and see how this all plays out and neither you nor I can predict the ending. Of course 1080p is a better alternative to 720p, but few people own Bluray drives as of yet, so this fact remains irrelevant for the moment. You don't really believe that disc rentals will outpace online downloads in the long run do you? Even Netflix's founder doesn't believe this, and as online movie downloads come to dominate the market, Apple will be there to compete, maybe even minus the 12-hour outages like the one that recently idled Netflix. Apple doesn't have to own this market, they just have to make sure that content is available for their hardware. If the iTunes movie store ends up with a big market share, so much the better for Apple.
As for our family, we don't purchase On Demand movies from our Comcast cable TV provider (generally poor choices of titles, little HD content and too expensive), Instead, we're still renting DVDs by mail and have not yet even committed to the AppleTV. I'm waiting just a little awhile longer for all this to play out and for the movie studios to stop delaying the rise of Apple's rental market (Apple TV does need more content, but this will come). However, I do see the handwriting on the wall and realize that online downloads are the future for movie rentals.
RE: "Amazon is eating Apples lunch when it comes to non-drm music."
So say the music labels, which have vested interest in claiming this, since they are actively trying to invent a competitor to Apple that might be able to help shift power back to their traditional, music business cartel. But so far, Apple still holds the same 80% online market-share in music that it held last year and independent sales figures are not available to confirm the recent claims about the strength of DRM-free sales made by the music labels. We do know this: Amazon is vying for a very small piece of the remaining 20% share of the market that Microsoft, Real, Rhapsody, eMusic and all the other alternative vendors share.
Even if this claim is true, it just doesn't matter. While still dominant, iTunes music sales are not as important to Apple as iPod/iPhone hardware sales. Content sales are little more than a loss leader for Apple and a way to make sure that compatible content is available for Steve Jobs' hardware products. Since Amazon's non-DRM tracks play on iPods, iPhones and Mac computers, the sales still benefit Apple as long as most people continue to purchase the company's hardware, which they will, because it has become a defacto standard.
Finally, you must agree that the industry-standard .mp4 tracks that Apple uses are a better alternative (as far as quality goes) to the old, .mp3 file standard that Amazon uses. The fact is, those Amazon .mp3 files are larger, take more time to download, and consume more storage space than comparable, modern .mp4 files. |
