With All Due Respect, Sir, I Don’t Think We Can Backdate iTunes Movie Inventory

With the Apple TV Take Two, we think we have it right this time. I think we have a great product.”

–Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, Jan. 23

Promises, promises, promises … When Apple (AAPL) debuted iTunes Movie Rentals this past January, the company pledged to offer “over 1,000 titles by the end of February, including over 100 titles in stunning high-definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound.” Well, today’s March 4 and, as best I can tell, Apple hasn’t kept its promise. Browse iTunes this morning with the software’s “Power Search,” and you’ll find just 411 films for rent–91 of them available in high definition. That’s 589 short of the promised 1,000–a discrepancy of nearly 60%.

Seems Apple may not have Apple TV quite right yet after all–the Hollywood licensing part of it, anyway.

UPDATE: At the Apple shareholder meeting yesterday, CEO Steve Jobs confirmed the discrepancy, saying the company’s goal of 1,000 rental titles on iTunes was short by around 600.

Neal Crocker

I’ve seen this story going around the internet, and I’m not sure it’s accurate. Many of the articles indicate that they use power search to determine the number of available movies. I counted about 1500 movies at about 4:30 pm PST today (3/4/2008) by using the browse function of iTMS, stepping through each genre, and totaling the listed movies, making no distinction between rental and purchasable movies. Maybe the power search function is broken. I have had problems with using the power search function in older versions (v. 6?) of iTunes to search for music and podcast. Power search would fail to return large numbers of results that I could find just by browing.
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com John Paczkowski

Hey Neal …

I determined the number of available movies in much the same way you did, but I counted only rentals. I counted twice and 411 was the number I arrived each time. I suppose there could be an issue with iTunes’ Power Search. That said, at the Apple shareholder meeting yesterday, Steve Jobs did say the goal of 1000 rental titles on iTunes was short by around 600.

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