“After introducing an online film rental business for American consumers last week, the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, said he expected that the service would be expanded into international markets later this year,” Eric Pfanner reports for The New York Times.
“But trying to establish a European version of the iTunes movie rental service, which allows users to stream films or television shows to their computers or televisions, will not be easy,” Pfanner reports.
“Apple will have to confront legal and regulatory hurdles, copyright challenges, scheduling conflicts and technological issues, reminders that the European media landscape remains a patchwork of individual countries, rather than the single market that the European Commission envisions,” Pfanner reports.
“Because of the difficulty of setting up cross-border services, many participants in the nascent market for digital film rentals or downloads in Europe operate in only one or a handful of countries,” Pfanner reports.
“Apple declined to discuss the timetable for its planned movie rental service in Europe,” Pfanner reports. “But the company may already be more familiar than many other companies with the intricacies of European content licensing, having recently settled an investigation by the European Commission into the pricing policies on its iTunes music store.”
“Despite the challenges that Apple and others will face, the European Commission predicts that revenue from digital sales of ‘creative content,’ including films, music and video games, will rise to 8.3 billion euros in 2010 from 1.8 billion euros in 2005, or to about $12.2 billion from $2.6 billion, across the European Union,” Pfanner reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Too Hot!” for the heads up.]