Archive for the ‘Stakes’ Category
Steve Jobs Stakes Out the TV Den
Posted on: May 5, 2008
- In: Amazon | Blockbuster | Caught in the Act | CinemaNow | Den | Hewlett-Packard | Microsoft | Netflix | Out | Sony | Stakes | steve jobs | TV
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A week ago, the family was stuck on I-95 between Washington and New York for seven hours. The Meatgrinder, as it is affectionately known to us, had a little case of congestion and after five hours of quality time, we were reduced to silently hating the intermittent FM signal and the brake lights that framed our existence.
But after we hooked an Apple iPod to a doohickey that works with the radio, the car suddenly filled with an hour’s worth of storytelling from a podcast of “This American Life,” followed by some quality time with Taylor Swift, an improbably gifted teenage country star. The ability to program our temporary purgatory lifted the pall and before we knew it, we were home.
But once we went inside, we hit the halt button on Apple. There was the second season of “Friday Night Lights” on Netflix, “John Adams” from HBO on the digital video recorder and back copies of “Weeds” from Showtime, there for the plucking from the on-demand service.
While a lot of us carry a little bit of Steve Jobs around in our pocket, Apple is now after the remaining bit of life-share that it doesn’t already own, the home front.
On Thursday, the company announced deals with 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment, among others, to sell movies for download on iTunes on the same day they are released on DVD.
The “day and date” downloaded movies (as they are called in industry jargon) will play only on Apple gadgets, but that characteristic may finally give the company the toehold in the American den that it has been looking for via Apple TV.
The movie business, because it makes its living on big fat video files that are harder to share than audio files, was able to watch and learn as the music industry shrank under the weight of pirated downloads and then reluctantly embraced a 99-cent solution from Mr. Jobs. And now every song, now and forever, is worth 99 cents, a price that attains for both the red-hot duet by Madonna and Justin Timberlake “Four Minutes,” and the forgotten B-sides he made when he was in a boy band.
The music companies still owned the songs, but Apple owned everything else — pricing, format, distribution and the lucrative revenue stream of manufactured devices.
When it comes to video, Apple has competition. Microsoft, Sony and Hewlett-Packard are vying to offer Web-enabled TV, while Amazon, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and Netflix sell movies digitally. So unlike the music companies, the movie studios seemed to be holding most of the cards.
They still might have blown it.
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