Alex Salkever in his “Byte of the Apple” column for BusinessWeek has a Q&A with Apple’s Phil Schiller who explains how the hot new digital music service will help curtail piracy — and sell lots more Macs and iPods.
Some snippets of Schiller’s comments:
“We’re not looking at [the iTunes Music Store] in terms of a stand-alone business. It’s part of all the things we’re doing at Apple. And first of all, I hope it can drive more iPod business.”
“We count somewhere north of 25 million active Mac users in the world. Over half of that user base [own] systems that can run Mac OS X.”
On Apple’s Digital Rights Management (DRM): “…it’s all built into the [iTunes] system. Our goal is to make it transparent for the user so that they never have to think about DRM. We’re using a DRM technology under the hood called FairPlay. It’s a DRM technology used by iTunes and QuickTime at the system level.”
When asked if Apple is planning video services “down the road,” Schiller responded, “No, right now we just want to make the world’s best music store. But I want to point out that iTunes includes particular music videos in the store. You can view some amazing music videos for free.”
Read the full article here.
But you can bet with Jobs at the helm, and Apple as the premier site for movie preview delivery, Apple will be a player in the online-movie-store business when it makes sense to jump in there.
The preview for feature movies is already available as Quicktime Trailers!
I think Apple has gone around the block several times, already, but the “real world” model of having Quicktime server farms does easily translate to the iTunes store, as Steve Jobs admitted in so many words himself at the announcement of iTunes 4.
Apple is just using common business sense.
So, yes, Apple will somehow have iMovie transformed into a digital movie store “soon enough”…
But it sure does suck to be an executive of any other company who is competing with Apple in that specific technology sector(s)… 😀