The ascent of the iTunes Store has been consistently touted as industry-changing, and not without reason. In the past five years, the Web-based marketplace for downloadable media has gone from startup size to one which, not very long after launch, began to tally sales in the billions, and soon made its big media partners grow hesitant of its influence on music sales and associated pricing controls.
Despite the music industry’s overt promotion of competitors, however, the iTunes Store has remained the biggest selling online storefront in the digital market. And today Apple is heralding one more milestone in the growth of the iTunes Store, marking the passage of the five-billionth song sold. There’s really no mystery as to why the iTunes Store continues to be the outstanding leader in the digital download arena. The company’s iTunes-plus-iPod/iPhone infrastructure still greatly simplifies media consumption, arguably more so than any other competitor.
The retailer often recognized as the next most substantial force in digital music sales, Amazon, has made remarkable headway in its effort to encroach on Apple’s dominance, but though the majority of the iTunes song catalog has been relegated to a technologically unappealing position laden with DRM and distributed with inferior audio quality, the storefront moves forth apace.
What’s more, Apple has today also divulged that the iTunes Store, following its recent introduction of movie purchases and rental options for newly released titles from several Hollywood studios, is now regularly distributing over 50,000 movies per day. Surely, if one were to juxtapose that figure against Netflix’s own statistics one might sense iTunes to be a virtual non-competitor. But placed against the budding market of download centers, which includes, among others, Amazon Unbox, Apple claims iTunes to be “the world’s most popular online movie store.”
Apple does not explicitly state an independent market researcher for its daily movie download figure, but suffice it to say that the figure of 50,000+ will gain perhaps as much attention as that recorded for sales of audio tracks upon further scrutiny. Movie downloads are an increasingly hot topic for market analysts, given the amount of piracy conducted over the Web, as well as in physical form. And with ISPs’ concerns over network data traffic, plus the costs required for consumers to opt into the habit of downloading movies on-demand from non-cable or satellite providers, many observers will likely peg iTunes first official statistic for movie sales and rentals as either good news or bad for the fate of the premium video download movement.
The movement presently involves material from film studios, television networks, and independent, Internet-born producers. Theoretically speaking, 50,000 movie rentals and purchases per day would amount to 18.25 million if maintained for an entire year, give or take any fluctuations in demand.
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