The next 24 hours is going to be pure chaos for Apple fans, and the madness started early this morning when Apple released iTunes 7.7. That was then followed by the App Store launch, then a "leaked" iPhone 2.0 firmware, and more. It's madness I tell you.
Apple has good reason to celebrate today after iTunes reached its five billion songs sold milestone. Five billion songs is a lot if you think about it. To put it into perspective, here are a few examples involving the number five billion...
The Al l Things D conference is going on right now and one of the most interesting things to come from it was when Walt Mossburg was interviewing Jeff Bezos, founder, president, and chief executive offer of Amazon.com. Bezos announced that within the next couple of weeks, Amazon will be launching a streaming movie service that users will pay for.
When Steve Jobs first announced the Apple TV, a device for playing digital content from iTunes, he was probably expecting it to become more of a hit than what it is. Sales aren't exactly stellar which leaves plenty of room for competition to come in and steal the show. In this case, it's Netflix's first streaming box made by Roku which in some ways, is coming in to shine brighter than the Apple TV.
Rumor had it that HBO shows would be appearing at the iTunes store soon. This was yesterday and now today, sure enough, HBO has made it's grand entrance. The official Press Release from Apple explains that programs like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and Rome, Flight of the Conchords and The Wire.
Today we're taking a look at Apple's Front Row vs. Windows Media Center. We're not really sure if Front Row can be compared to Media Center because right now, they serve different purposes. Front Row is more of an interface for controlling the media already on your computer while Media Center will do that in addition to recording television shows.
Last week we wrote about how iTunes was getting new movies and making them available to purchase the same day as the DVD release. This is a pretty big step for Apple, and now we're learning that they're actually losing money on these new movies. The Wall Street Journal reported that while Apple is selling newly released movies at $14.99, they're actually paying the studios about $16 for each movie.
Purchasing movies from iTunes continues to get better and more convenient for buyers. If you've bought movies from them before, you know that it usually takes at least 30 days from the time a movie comes out on DVD until the time it's available to buy on iTunes. Yesterday the big news was that Warner Brothers was saying that they were going to be making their movies available online sooner.
On this day five years ago, the Apple iTunes Music Store launched. The date was April 28, 2003, and ever since the launch, the store has managed to become more successful than I think anyone ever imagined. By early this year in 2008, over 4 billion songs have been sold through the store.
The ad:tech conference is currently going on at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and one of the most interesting things to come out of it came from the mouth of NBC's Chief Digital Officer George Kliavkoff. In a nutshell, he said he wanted Apple to build a piracy detecting iTunes and to offer flexible pricing before NBC would allow their content to return to iTunes. Here's what he said:
