I used my iPad to shoot video of my brother’s wedding. I want to get the file into my computer, but it’s too large to email or place in my Dropbox account. Any ideas on solving my problem?

A:

You can transfer the file to a computer using the iPad’s charging/syncing cable. Just plug it into the computer and if it’s a Mac, launch iPhoto and you can use its import function to transfer the video. If it’s a modern Windows PC, a window should appear and you can use its import function to transfer the video. On a PC running the old Windows XP, you would use the Scanner and Camera Wizard. Apple has an article explaining all this.

Q:

What is the best way to transfer files from my old computer with Windows XP to my new computer with Windows 7?

A:

I’d suggest trying the built-in file transfer utility in Windows 7, called Windows Easy Transfer. It’s automated and can operate over a network, or by using USB flash drives, external hard disks or a special cable called an Easy Transfer Cable, which costs under $20.

Q:

How do you remove pictures from an iPhone? I have tried to delete them, but I have been unsuccessful.

A:

In the Photos app, in the Camera Roll, which is the main repository for pictures you take on an iPhone, there’s a trash-can icon at the lower right of the screen when you are viewing a photo. Tap it and select “Delete Photo.” The same thing works with Photo Stream, the optional feature that wirelessly syncs pictures among all your Apple devices.

To delete photos synced from a computer via a cable, you have to connect the device to the computer, de-select the albums you chose in the iTunes program and then re-sync.

Write to Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Software giant Microsoft released a version of its Office application for Apple’s iPhone today. It has been the subject of a lot of speculation, and apparently there were some contentious issues between Apple and Microsoft regarding the split of revenue.

A few things to know about this app: First, in order to use it, you must have an existing Office 365 subscription — so you can’t just use it as a one-off app — and you can access documents stored in SkyDrive and SharePoint, and you can only save documents to those services. Second, you can create and edit Word and Excel documents, but not PowerPoint decks, including PowerPoint decks, and there is a feature for displaying them and showing them off in “presentation mode.” It also opens Office documents attached to email messages. (Update: Microsoft says you can edit PowerPoint decks. My mistake there.)

Microsoft is positioning this as the optimal way to see and use Office documents on the iPhone; this is, for now, an-iPhone only app. Charts, animations and other elements are supported. There’s no iPad version yet, though obviously it will run on the iPad. Offline editing is supported.

Two features only work if you have Office 365 running on a Windows PC: Recent Documents shows documents you’ve read recently on your computer, and Resume Reading keeps track of where you left off reading a document on your computer, and brings you back to that point.

Here’s the official screenshot from iTunes:

On the stand this week in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book price-fixing case against Apple, Keith Moerer — head of the company’s iBookstore — defended the storefront against a government attorney who characterized it as a “failure.”

“E-book sales grew 100 percent last year at the iBookstore, and it had over 100 million customers,” Moerer said.

So, how much of the U.S. e-book market does Apple actually control? According to Moerer, 20 percent.

“I believe that Apple has about 20 percent market share,” Moerer said. “It’s very difficult because there are not industry-wide sales reporting for e-books, but I believe that the iBookstore’s market share is approximately 20 percent in the U.S. and growing.”

That’s twice the 10 percent share typically attributed to the company. And if it’s an accurate accounting of Apple’s share, it means that the 65 percent and 25 percent shares often attributed to Amazon and Barnes & Noble respectively might be in need of reassessment. It also means that e-books are becoming a significant contributor to Apple’s iTunes business.

Just like Pandora, users can create radio stations based on songs they’re listening to. And, yes, iTunes Radio lets you share those stations you create with friends. You’re also able to flip through curated channels picked by the dudes at Apple, and even select a channel based on what’s trending on Twitter.

Apple has its work cut out to take down Pandora, which currently holds 70 percent of Internet radio marketshare among the Top 20 Internet radio stations in the U.S., according to Pandora. And it’s a cross-platform app, which means reaching all sorts of users, not just the Apple devotees.

That’s not even including Amazon, Google’s new All Access music service and the myriad other competitors in the space.

But Apple still has a broad customer base who have bought millions of its products. And iTunes radio will be built into all Apple software, including iOS, OS X and Apple TV. So there’s your instant install base, right off the bat.

iTunes Radio comes ad-free if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber, Apple’s existing cloud-based music service which lets users incorporate their previously purchased tracks into their cloud-based library. Apple will kick off iRadio starting first in the U.S., with plans to add more countries over time.

Along with the new Radio service, Apple introduced a series of improvements to other iOS apps, like Siri — which will come with a new interface and feature Twitter integration and now routes to Bing for search queries — and debuted iOS in the Car, which, just like it says, brings many iOS applications to the screen of your vehicle (think “music and Siri access from the driver’s seat”).

There’s also FaceTime audio, which lets users make high-quality audio calls over Wi-Fi, and is integrated with China’s Tencent Weibo.

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As a child, watching television (as digital was defined by the greenish dots emanating from an Apple IIe) was limited to four-ish broadcast channels — NBC 3, ABC 5, CBS 8 (when it didn’t rain) and syndication on 43 — on a three-and-a-half-inch black-and-white television in the kitchen. Despite the constrained display, I was a voracious consumer of syndicated dramas and comedies, from “MASH” to “The Greatest American Hero,” offering no judgement on the quality — just reveling in the availability. The living room television — a glorious twenty-plus inch color CRT — was reserved for “premium” viewing experiences: “20/20” with Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters on Friday nights or — connected to a Sony Betamax — watching “Popeye” Doyle racing down the streets of Chicago, Jack Walsh trying to get “The Duke” back to Los Angeles, and Chuck Yeager pushing the edge of the envelope.

Fast forward to 2000 when I began a new phase of my life: Cord-cutting. I paid my last bill for landline service and never looked back. I paid my last bill for cable television service, but my alternative methods — DVDs via Netflix, trips to the theater on 23rd Street, watching postage-sized video via V CAST, early on-demand services from ABC.com — were obstacles in understanding the watercooler chat around shows such as “24,” “Lost,” “Arrested Development,” “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under.”

Six years later, it was time to rekindle my relationship with the pay-television operator. Each year — and recently, each month — the internal debate continues: The necessity of the pay-television operator vs. the future of the OTT provider. At the CTIA Show in May, I participated in a panel to discuss that very same issue.

Have Pay Providers Already Lost?

Recent industry data from Leichtman Research Group reported that for the first time, the pay-television industry had a net subscriber loss over a four-quarter period. This data added to the argument of the growing — albeit small on an absolute scale — population of cord cutters and “cord nevers.” Nielsen began tracking a group that doesn’t subscribe to traditional cable and satellite options. This Zero-TV group currently numbers more than 5,000,000 households in the U.S., up from 2,000,000 in 2007.

Have the pay-television operators already lost the living room? Or are they — as stated during a session at OTTCON — dinosaurs with lasers?

Pay to Play

In thinking about the “Mad Men” experience from earlier in the post, over the next several days I was able to watch on multiple devices (iPad, iPhone, Xbox, Apple TV) and in multiple locations (living room, bedroom, garage, backyard). Netflix has done a tremendous job in establishing a level of digital ubiquity that not only differentiates them from ostensibly other OTT alternatives from Hulu and Amazon but has created an expectation of digital ubiquity within the mind of the consumer. I would argue that this ubiquity has been a core enabler of their current relevance in the marketplace, as important as their focus on content aggregation and discovery. Just as it took research and innovation to scale and optimize their physical distribution, they executed successfully in digital distribution.

However, as the pay-television operators were well aware, content is still king and consumers follow the content — legally or illegally. Initially, their digital content acquisition strategy emphasized quantity over quality, but as the entire industry began to take notice — and those early content licensors began to think more strategically about how and to whom they wanted to license film and television content — Netflix shifted course and began trimming its library (bye-bye thousands of titles from Sony, Warner, MGM, Universal, WB, Viacom, Starz, etc.) and investing heavily into original content (“House of Cards,” “Arrested Development,” “Hemlock Grove,” “Sense8,” “Lilyhammer,” “Orange Is the New Black”) with plans to double the number of original programming series in 2014. With a renewed focus on programming — especially pricey original programming on the order of $100 million for “House of Cards” — it’s no surprise that Netflix has content liabilities on the order of multiple billions of dollars over the next five years. However, Netflix’s announcement in April that its 29 million domestic subscribers surprised HBO for the first time only bolstered the believers in the company’s strategy and execution and added more questions to the debate at hand.

In one regard, it’s encouraging to see a company like Netflix take the initiative (read: risk) in producing content, whether it’s creating a series from scratch or reviving one that ended its run on broadcast or pay television. While there may seem to be “obvious” candidates like “Arrested Development,” there are likely as many rabid fans of “Battlestar Galactica,” “Southland,” and “Fringe” that would carry the torch for reviving these series but likely without a material increase in subs. And for every “Sopranos,” there’s the $35 million loss with duds such as “Luck.” The broadcast networks go through this song and dance every year, with the fate of pilots and series left to the fickle, multi-tasking, multi-screen consumption behavior of the everyday consumer.

If Netflix’s strategy is viewed as the bellwether for the OTT landscape, we will continue to see OTT providers:

• Focus on their strength by increasing digital ubiquity
• Differentiate their offering through content (e.g., Amazon’s content deals with CBS, Twentieth Century Fox or their own original programming) or digital commerce bundling (e.g., Amazon’s bundling of Instant Video with Prime).

With the growth trend of original programming and exclusive content deals, doesn’t it feel like OTT providers are beginning to remind you of pay-television providers?

OTT providers can maintain their advantage in ubiquity as device and platform fragmentation will continue to plague all players within the ecosystem for the foreseeable future. We won’t see the demise of pay-television providers anytime soon. We’re more likely to see OTT augment pay television as an additional method of video consumption, and based on the continued success of OTT providers, pay-television providers will be faced with improving their digital capabilities, changing their business model and embracing the mobile lifestyle to reverse the subscriber erosion or risk a fundamental collapse of the industry.

Content Rights (And Wrongs)

Pay-television providers aren’t going away anytime soon, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a lot of work to do to placate their customers.

I doubt my situation is uncommon:

• As a satellite subscriber, I pay over a hundred dollars a month for over six hundred channels.
• My household watches about a dozen or so channels on a regular basis.
• While we rent an occasional PPV film, it’s typically not something that is unavailable on a digital platform (e.g., iTunes).
• While I am aware of offerings that are enabled by TV Everywhere, my pay-television provider is not supported on many that are of interest to me (e.g., Watch ABC, WatchESPN, Pac-12 Networks, etc.).

Fundamentally, pay-television providers must cater to the mobile lifestyle of today’s consumer. I’ll touch on the topic of the “mobile lifestyle” in a future post, but the core tenet is that consumers have had 1) access to a wealth of digital content (e.g., from services such as Netflix and iTunes); 2) access to devices that free them from the living room (e.g., smartphones, companion devices that need just a monitor and Wifi). As a result, consumers expect to consume anytime, anywhere and from any device.

From the perspective of the content programmers, they have a proven business model with the (contested) ability to bundle channels (to the chagrin of most consumers, including John McCain), leveraging popular channels to promote new or struggling sister channels.

From the perspective of the pay-television providers, they are burdened with an issue the OTT providers were fairly quick to resolve: Content rights. Pay-television providers have multi-year content deals with content programmers based on a cost per subscriber. As part of these deals, content rights limit how, when and where customers can consume the content. For example, my pay-television provider has an iPad application that includes digital simulcast and on-demand viewing. However, when viewing on the local Wi-Fi network, only a handful of channels are available for simulcast. And when viewing away from home, almost every channel is restricted. As for the on-demand digital content, it’s only a fraction of what’s available via the television VOD option. Even though many services offer TV Everywhere authentication, my pay-television provider is missing from many of the more popular.

From the perspective of the consumer, we don’t care about the content rights; we only know that we’re not getting the content when, where and how we want it.

One of my fellow panelists at CTIA stated that rights are typically 4 to 5 years in length and can be changed, modified and updated. But, I countered, the iPad is only three-and-a-half years old. The entire landscape has changed faster than the duration of the content window.

TV Everywhere?

A European colleague of mine once remarked, “What’s so special about TV Everywhere? We already have TV everywhere.” The concept of TV Everywhere authentication is a U.S.-centric model, a convoluted video experience born in 2009 as a reaction of the existing broadcast model to the growth of OTT services. I’ll reserve a future discussion for a more in-depth analysis of the state of TV Everywhere, but a number of issues continue to plague its future:

• Awareness: The industry continues to struggle with educating consumers with the value of the service given its complex origins in content rights and the awkward linking of pay-television providers with content programmers. The rollout of TV Everywhere has been slow and inconsistent, as consumers are forced to navigate seemingly competitive offerings from their pay-television providers and their content programmers.
• Authentication: Authentication — the simple act of logging in with a username and password — continues to be an obstacle for adoption. As most consumers relate access to content with the programmer (i.e., network/channel) rather than their pay-television provider, the authentication process’s use of login credentials supplied from the pay-television provider is not a logical linkage. The TV Everywhere ecosystem needs to simplify this entire process:
  ○ Using geographic and/or IP data to more intelligently filter a list of a hundred potential pay-television providers to a handful
  ○ Auto-detecting when consumers are on their home network and bypassing the authentication process
  ○ Extending authentication to a per-user vs. per-household model to enable better control over content (e.g., restricting content by TV rating based on the household member)
  ○ Exploring the use of alternative credentials, e.g., social network identities
• Availability: Consumers have grown impatient with the inconsistent availability of TV Everywhere, as pay-television providers offer only a subset of the broadcast content and content programmers offer access to only a subset of pay-television providers. As TV Everywhere continues to be shaped by the issue of content rights, its long-term success will depend on the ability for pay-television providers and content programmers to unify the broadcast and digital models to ensure that the availability of content reaches a level of ubiquity established by the OTT providers.

And Then There Was Aereo

Over the past year, NYC-based Aereo has raised eyebrows, excited cord-cutters and found itself in legal hot water with a who’s who of major broadcasters including ABC, CBS, Disney, Fox Television, NBCUniversal, PBS, Telemundo, Twentieth Century Fox and Univision for a range of violations, the core issue being copyright infringement.

Aereo is a unique hybrid. Its business is providing digital content directly to consumers in a paid subscription model. While its support devices are somewhat limited today (desktop Web browsers, iPad, iPhone, AppleTV via iPad/iPhone, Roku), its content and its method of acquiring that content is what has been controversial. Aereo enables consumers to view live broadcast content and record for time-shifted viewing.

Aereo avoids paying retransmission fees as it contends that its digital streaming is not public performance, as each subscriber is assigned their own individual dime-sized antenna. As the next customer joins, Aereo adds another antenna; as the next million customers join, Aereo adds a million antennas. Each customer has their own assigned physical antenna and manages their own DVR.

Over the course of a year, it seemed that its “army of antennas” strategy would lead it down a path similar to now defunct Zediva, which used an “army of DVRs” and a pile of DVDs to stream Hollywood movies to consumers. Even though each physical DVD player (in Zediva’s datacenter) played back an individual DVD to an individual subscriber, the courts didn’t support this supposed loophole based on previous rulings such as Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Redd Horne, Inc. Zediva lost their argument in court (Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. WTV Systems, Inc.), paid a $1.8 million fee, and promptly shut down after less than a year.

While Aereo’s position was able to stand based on legal precedent (Cartoon Network, LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc.), the ruling by the Second Circuit was not without criticism.

Judge Denny Chin’s dissent suggests the matter may not be settled in the court of public opinion:

In my view, by transmitting (or retransmitting) copyrighted programming to the public without authorization, Aereo is engaging in copyright infringement in clear violation of the Copyright Act.
…
Aereo’s “technology platform” is, however, a sham. (Emphasis mine)
…
The system employs thousands of individual dime-sized antennas, but there is no technologically sound reason to use a multitude of tiny individual antennas rather than one central antenna; indeed, the system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law. [Emphasis mine] After capturing the broadcast signal, Aereo makes a copy of the selected program for each viewer, whether the user chooses to “Watch” now or “Record” for later. Under Aereo’s theory, by using these individual antennas and copies, it may retransmit, for example, the Super Bowl “live” to 50,000 subscribers and yet, because each subscriber has an individual antenna and a “unique recorded cop[y]” of the broadcast, these are “private” performances. Of course, the argument makes no sense. These are very much public performances.

Already available in New York with 30 channels and Boston with 21 channels, it plans to expand to 20+ additional markets over the course of the year. With backing by Barry Diller and IAC’s $38 million and support for industry reform from John McCain, Aereo appears to be on track as a new player squarely in the middle of both OTT and pay-television providers — foe of the pay-television providers but not necessarily the friend of the OTT providers.

Cater to the Mobile Lifestyle

While Aereo may be (for the time being) legal, and while it may be satisfying the needs of its consumers, its method for supplying its service feels off. The critical point in my mind is the saying that nature abhors a vacuum; Aereo is fulfilling a consumer need that is missing from current pay-television providers: Lower-cost, unbundled, digital content targeted for a mobile lifestyle.

However, pay-television providers still command 95 million subscribers and have the opportunity to delight their customers — me included.

A few suggestions:

• Reinvent TV Everywhere: TV Everywhere needs rethinking to educate consumers and reduce the technical and business friction between pay-television providers and content programmers.
• Embrace Fragmentation: Pay-television providers should consider the expanding set of platforms (from smartphones to game consoles) as new touch points, an opportunity to extend its brand throughout the daily routine of consumers.
• Emphasize Search and Discovery: Making good content is hard. Finding that content can be equally frustrating. Pay-television providers should focus on how they can reinvent the notion of the EPG to create personalized content libraries for each member of the household, like
  ○ Parent A likes Anime, sports and news
  ○ Parent B likes documentaries, science fiction and Ellen
  ○ Child C is restricted to TV Y programs
  ○ Child D is restricted to TV 14 programs and the major broadcast channels.
• Support for Offline & Out of Home: Consumers are on the move and expect content to follow. While some consumers will prefer illegal means for obtaining content, consumers shouldn’t feel they need to resort to it. Pay-television providers should focus on how to bring content — and implicitly the provider brand — with them even in offline and disconnected scenarios, e.g., watching on a plane, train, or automobile.

Pay-television providers can’t transform the industry without the support of content programmers, who are often pointed to as the ones forcing channel bundling upon providers and thus on consumers. However, if pay-television providers can adapt their services to changing consumer behavior, we may see less arguments for disrupting the industry and see more actions that improve it.

Albert Lai is CTO, media and broadcast solutions at Brightcove. In this role, Albert provides technical leadership within Brightcove’s media and entertainment team, working with customers to meet their multi-platform content delivery, workflow and distribution requirements. Albert holds a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University.

On Sunday Apple inked a licensing deal with Warner Music Group for the rights to its recorded music and music publishing, agreeing to terms on the publishing side that other major music publishers have been seeking, according to people familiar with the matter.

Under the deal, Apple will give Warner Music Group’s publishing arm 10 percent of ad revenue — more than twice what Internet radio giant Pandora Media — pays major music publishers. Warner’s terms with Apple could pave the way for other major publishing deals to follow.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Asa Mathat | D: All Things Digital

There are at least seven bidders for Hulu. But that doesn’t mean its TV network owners are actually going to sell it.

That possibility has always existed, but it was good for Disney executive Anne Sweeney to remind us about it today, onstage at the D: All Things Digital conference. Disney owns the video site, along with News Corp. and Comcast (News Corp. also owns this website).

Sweeney also reminded us of Hulu’s original purpose: To give the networks a place to host their stuff online that could compete with YouTube, and, to a lesser extent, Apple and iTunes.

And while she was at it, she offered an opinion on Barry Diller’s Aereo. If you’ve followed that story, her response won’t surprise you.

But Marlene King, who produces “Pretty Little Liars” for Disney’s ABC Family, is a little more ambivalent about Aereo. Perhaps there’s a future where Diller ends up cutting her a check instead of Disney.

Full D11 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130529/what-if-hulu-really-isnt-for-sale-after-all/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130516/apples-itunes-app-store-passes-50-billion-downloads/ http://allthingsd.com/20130516/apples-itunes-app-store-passes-50-billion-downloads/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 07:01:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=322348 Apple couldn’t have timed its countdown to 50 billion app downloads more perfectly. Just hours after Google revealed during its I/O conference keynote that app installs from its Google Play store had hit 48 billion, the iTunes App Store countdown clock rolled over to 50 billion, passing another major milestone and surpassing the achievement its rival had announced earlier in the day. The 50-billionth app? Say the Same Thing. Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio, will receive a $10,000 App Store gift card for downloading it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130516/apples-itunes-app-store-passes-50-billion-downloads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130514/google-doubles-down-on-music-subscriptions-which-means-google-isnt-serious-about-music-subscriptions/ http://allthingsd.com/20130514/google-doubles-down-on-music-subscriptions-which-means-google-isnt-serious-about-music-subscriptions/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 03:55:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=321670 Yes, Google plans to launch a subscription music service this week, via its Google Play store.

And, yes, Google still plans to launch a separate subscription music service later this year, via its YouTube site.

Make sense? Of course not.

It makes lots of sense for both YouTube and Play, which was built for Google’s Android devices, to sell music subscriptions.

YouTube is the world’s biggest free music service, which could make it a fantastic funnel for a Spotify-like paid offering, which can also help solve some problems with the music labels.

And if you’re going to have the world’s dominant mobile platform, then you ought to be the one selling music subscriptions that work on it, because that could help your customers stick to that platform. No sense in handing that feature over to Spotify, which works fine on iPhones and Kindles, too.

And something that knitted Android and YouTube together — combining a mix of free, paid, mobile, audio and video — could be great.

But that’s not what we’re going to see this week.

Music folks I talked to today expect the Google Play version to be paid-only — no free teaser tier, like Spotify has — and without any features that will set it apart from rivals.

And when YouTube launches its service — as best as I can tell, talks with the Big Three labels are all but completed — that service will likely run parallel to, but not connected with, the Play version. Which means none of the free music that people can get on YouTube will help sell Play subscriptions.

This set-up supposedly stems from former Android boss Andy Rubin’s insistence on controlling his own fiefdom (“Andy and [YouTube head] Salar Kamangar couldn’t be in the same room together,” said a music executive who has worked with both of them). But now we’re in the Sundar Pichai era, and he said he’s all about peace and love.

I’ve heard people in and outside of Google suggest that at some point down the line the two services could be knitted together. After all, just because something gets announced at Google I/O doesn’t mean it will show up. And getting something out there before it’s fully baked is standard operating procedure for Google.

But music subscriptions are an old idea that still really haven’t caught on in a big way. Spotify has six million paying customers worldwide, but its backers concede that it’s still a long way from mainstream. And none of its competitors are even close to those numbers.

If Google really wanted to make subscriptions work, instead of simply offering them as a feature most people won’t use — like the music store it opened up in 2011 — it ought to take the time to get this one right the first time.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130514/google-doubles-down-on-music-subscriptions-which-means-google-isnt-serious-about-music-subscriptions/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130513/itunes-makes-big-bucks-for-a-break-even-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20130513/itunes-makes-big-bucks-for-a-break-even-business/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 19:02:05 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=320976

Horace Dediu/Asymco

When Apple last reported earnings, the company said iTunes billings for the quarter came it at over $4 billion. Apple expects to post similar billings in the quarters ahead for a $16 billion annual run rate. That’s an awfully big number. How does it break down on a per-user basis?

Asymco’s Horace Dediu has done the math and come up with a number: About $40 per year, on average. Seem low to you? Does to me, but that’s from my own cord-cutter perspective. But taken together with all gross content revenues — including services & software — Apple’s iTunes business cleared over $5.5 billion in the last quarter (Caveat 1:That big number is as large as it is thanks to significant growth in app sales; Caveat 2: iTunes’ sales growth may be slowing).

Not bad for what Apple conceived as a “break-even” business, one that it doesn’t yet view as a leg on its three-legged stool. Perhaps it’s time for the company to upgrade that analogy to four-legged chair — or throw in the iPad as well and make it a recliner …

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130513/itunes-makes-big-bucks-for-a-break-even-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130510/does-windows-8-rt-have-enough-users-for-its-own-itunes-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20130510/does-windows-8-rt-have-enough-users-for-its-own-itunes-app/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 21:30:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=320381 Windows tablet users hoping for a version of Apple’s iTunes media software optimized for Windows 8’s app-oriented “Metro” interface are going to have a long time to wait. Because according to Microsoft, Apple is in no rush to develop one.

To be clear, iTunes is available for Windows 8, but using it requires jumping through some hoops. For Windows 8 users, that means having to go into the desktop to run the Windows 7 version of iTunes. It’s even worse, though, for those with one of the Windows RT machines, such as Microsoft’s Surface RT. They are really out of luck as older Windows apps don’t run at all.

“You shouldn’t expect an iTunes app on Windows 8 any time soon,” Windows CFO Tami Reller told CNN. “ITunes is in high demand. The welcome mat has been laid out. It’s not for lack of trying.”

No, not for lack of trying. But, perhaps, for lack of something else: User base.

According to IDC, Microsoft sold only about 900,000 of its Surface tablets during the first quarter of the year. That’s only about 1.8 percent of the overall market. And it dwarfs the number of RT tablets shipped during the same period — just 200,000, or 0.4 percent of all tablet sales.

It’s hard to imagine Apple looking at that as an opportunity worth throwing a lot of engineering resources at.

There may well be other roadblocks as well: a reticence on Apple’s part to improve the user experience on a rival tablet and perhaps some residual sparring over Office for iOS revenue sharing issues. But audience size is the most obvious issue, and the one that would likely cause Apple to balk at developing the iTunes client that for which Microsoft is clearly angling.

Which is not to say that it won’t someday. Apple has done quite well with iTunes for the PC since debuting it in 2003. Today it’s on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs, making Apple a leading Windows developer. As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said at our our fifth D conference, giving iTunes to Windows users is “like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell” (9:50 in the video below). If Apple feels the same way about Windows 8 Metro, perhaps it’s just waiting for the addressable market to increase a bit.

Apple declined comment on iTunes for Windows 8.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130510/does-windows-8-rt-have-enough-users-for-its-own-itunes-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130507/at-10-you-still-have-some-tricks-itunes/ http://allthingsd.com/20130507/at-10-you-still-have-some-tricks-itunes/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 22:28:56 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=319226 Apple just celebrated the 10th birthday of its famed iTunes, which is easily the most popular source for buying digital content. Still, I regularly field questions from my family and friends about how iTunes works. These range from basic questions about syncing to storing music in the cloud and sharing music with family. And iTunes also has a lot of features most people don’t know exist. This week, I rounded up some ways to improve the way you use iTunes.

Digital Allowance

If you aren’t thrilled at the prospect of setting your credit-card number as the default payment on your kid’s iTunes account, a monthly allowance might be a better solution. From the iTunes Store home page on your computer, select “Send iTunes Gifts” on the right, then “Learn More About Gifting” and scroll to the bottom to find allowance settings. You can set the allowance in amounts ranging from $10 to $50.

Recipients must have an Apple ID, but you can set up an Apple ID for them at the same time. You can decide to send the allowance right away or wait until the next month, on either the first or the day of the month you set up the allowance. You also can add a personal message.

Redeeming Gift Cards

Some people are thrilled to receive iTunes gift cards, but they just don’t know how to redeem them. A simple shortcut on a computer or mobile devices is to open iTunes, navigate to the iTunes Store, scroll to the very bottom of the store’s home screen and click Redeem. (On a computer, this is under Manage. In the iOS app, it’s in the bottom, center of the screen.) You’ll be asked to enter your Apple ID and then to enter your gift card or download code. If you accidentally scratched letters or numbers from your code like I did once, call or email Apple Support and they’ll help you figure it out.

Gifts Without the Gift Card

Anything in the iTunes Store or Apple’s App Store can be given to another person via an email. On your computer, select the arrow beside the price and click on “Gift this.” If you’re using an Apple mobile device, select the share icon (a small square with an arrow pointing right) at the top of the screen from the store and choose “Gift.” Then enter a personal message and choose Now or Other Date to decide when the recipient gets it.

This is especially helpful for favorite games or TV shows that you want friends to start playing or watching.

Sharing Libraries

Many family members or friends may find themselves frustrated by how their digital content is stored in individual libraries associated with individual Apple IDs, making it harder to share this content. While you can’t merge Apple IDs to combine libraries, you can turn on Home Sharing within your home Wi-Fi network to let various devices share content while they’re within range of the network. Turn on Home Sharing from the Advanced menu in iTunes and enter the same Apple ID on up to five computers. Likewise, you can stream content from other shared computers, or drag it onto your computer’s local library.

You also can see this shared content from iOS devices and Apple TV. Within the Music app on iOS, click the More tab in the bottom right. In the Videos app, tap the Shared button at the top. On your Apple TV, go into Settings, Computer and turn on Home Sharing, then open the Computer icon in your Apple TV’s main menu to access libraries and stream content.

iCloud vs. iTunes Match

Owners of Apple products surely have heard of iCloud, but they may not use it. Some people aren’t sure how it works with music and how it differs from iTunes Match.

ICloud is a handy insurance policy against losing your iPod and all of your iTunes content along with it. Once you set up iCloud using your Apple ID, any content that you buy from the iTunes Store will show up on other devices without any syncing. Any past purchases from the iTunes Store will show up on all of your devices, too. Tapping a tiny cloud icon beside each file will pull it onto your device.

To replicate all of your content across devices, including stuff you haven’t bought from iTunes (like CDs you imported or bought elsewhere), iTunes Match will do the trick. This costs $25 a year and matches up to 25,000 songs. From iTunes on your computer, open the Store menu, select “Turn on iTunes Match,” enter your Apple ID and password and click Subscribe. On iOS devices, open Settings, Music and turn on iTunes Match.

ITunes Match will work on up to 10 devices, and it auto-scans for newly purchased content so you have it on all devices.

Getting Rid of Content

It may seem like everything in your iTunes library is stuck there for good. But if you’re tired of keeping unwanted files, like episodes of Season 2′s “Mad Men” or irritating tunes from a Christmas party playlist, the process to delete them is painless.

From your iTunes library on the computer, click the item to select it, press the delete key and click Delete Item. From here, you can opt to remove the item only from your iTunes library, which keeps the file on your computer though not in iTunes (click “Keep File”), or delete the item from your computer permanently (click “Move to Trash” and empty the Trash).

When you know how all of its features work, iTunes can be a real pleasure to use. But if you’re confused, syncing content can be a dreaded experience. If you know people who tiptoe around how to use iTunes, share this guide with them.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130507/at-10-you-still-have-some-tricks-itunes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130503/spotify-takes-a-page-from-the-twitter-playbook-buys-music-discovery-app-tunigo/ http://allthingsd.com/20130503/spotify-takes-a-page-from-the-twitter-playbook-buys-music-discovery-app-tunigo/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 14:07:50 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=318098 Last fall, Twitter bought We Are Hunted, a “music discovery” startup that made a popular app for Spotify.

Apparently Spotify is paying attention: It just bought Tunigo, another music discovery startup with a popular Spotify app.

Spotify isn’t announcing terms for the deal, but says that all of the Swedish company’s 20 or so employees will come to work at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

The Tunigo Spotify app will keep running (there’s also an iPhone app), but presumably Spotify’s new hires will be put to work on Spotify’s main service, which has 24 million users and six million paying subscribers. Tunigo had reportedly raised $3 million.

The We Are Hunted and Tunigo deals aren’t exactly parallel, since Twitter used We Are Hunted to build a brand-new music app, and Spotify doesn’t need one of those. But they do show that digital music companies are putting a renewed emphasis on helping people find stuff they like — which has the obvious benefit of keeping them on the service longer, and/or convincing them to pay for them.

Internet radio service Pandora has always been about discovery, but lots of other services have been content to assemble millions of tracks and ask listeners to poke through them on their own, or to ask their friends for recommendations.

Now lots of companies are starting to emphasize curation. That’s the entire point of Jimmy Iovine’s new Beats/Daisy music service, scheduled for launch later this year. And if Apple is able to hammer out deals with music labels — last I heard, they’re still stuck haggling with Sony Music and Sony/ATV, its related-but-separate publishing company — it will launch an iRadio service that combines elements of both Pandora and on-demand services.

If you have a Spotify subscription and haven’t played with Tunigo, by the way, it’s worth checking out: Like Web radio service Songza, it is focused on mood- and theme-based playlists, and it’s pretty good.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130503/spotify-takes-a-page-from-the-twitter-playbook-buys-music-discovery-app-tunigo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130503/hearst-gets-its-million-digital-subscribers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130503/hearst-gets-its-million-digital-subscribers/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=318021 Last year, Hearst Magazines head David Carey said his company would have a million people subscribing to its tablet editions by the end of 2012.

That didn’t happen, and they ended December with something like 900,000 subscribers. But now it has: Carey said Hearst hit the one million mark at the end of March.

“I’m glad we got there,” Carey said. “We were just 90 days late.”

In February, at our D: Dive Into Media conference, Carey said he thinks that in 2016, Hearst will have three million digital subscribers, or about 10 percent of his entire base.

As we’ve noted before, tablets aren’t going to save the magazine business, but they are a nice new revenue stream for it. And a million is very respectable, given that the iPad only showed up three years ago, and publishers really didn’t have a way of offering digital subscriptions through Apple’s iTunes until midway through 2011. (That number also includes Nook and Kindle subscribers, and, theoretically, some Android owners, too.)

To refresh your memory on Carey’s take on digital and print publishing, here’s the highlight reel of my chat with him a couple months ago:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130503/hearst-gets-its-million-digital-subscribers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130425/itunes-sales-are-huge-but-growth-may-be-slowing/ http://allthingsd.com/20130425/itunes-sales-are-huge-but-growth-may-be-slowing/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:00:51 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=315401 Apple sold $2.4 billion worth of apps, music, movies and books via its iTunes store last quarter. That’s almost twice what the company was doing two years ago. And no matter how you look at it, it means Apple is a giant force in digital media retail.

That said, it looks like iTunes’ sales growth may be slowing down.

Last quarter, iTunes sales increased 28 percent; in the previous quarter they increased 23 percent. Most retailers would be very happy to see those kind of leaps, but as far as I can tell, they are the smallest increases Apple has seen in the last two years.*

You can see what the last two quarters looked like in context, below:

So what does that mean? Dunno. Maybe nothing more than a statistical blip.

If I had to bet, though, I’d put money on a couple different culprits:

• In the old days, when Apple only sold music, iTunes sales rose alongside iPod sales: Whenever someone bought a new gadget, they spent some money on songs, too. Assume the same is happening here, but for all digital media. And booming iPad sales aren’t enough to overcome more modest iPhone sales.
• The other thing that fuels iTunes sales is the expansion of new markets — new iTunes stores and iTunes App Stores opening up in new countries. And maybe those lines shoot right up again if or when Forbes shows up in China. We’ll see.

* All the data in this chart either comes directly from Apple, via the prepared statements CFO Peter Oppenheimer reads during quarterly earnings calls, or via math I’ve done myself, based on those same numbers. The chart only goes back two years because Apple didn’t consistently provide iTunes sales numbers before then.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130425/itunes-sales-are-huge-but-growth-may-be-slowing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitters-new-music-app-launches-friday/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitters-new-music-app-launches-friday/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 02:38:50 +0000 Mike Isaac and Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=311355 Next up on the jukebox — Twitter Music.

The microblogging service plans to launch its new standalone music application on Friday, according to sources familiar with the matter.

(Update:: Of note — another source claims that the app will indeed launch this weekend at Coachella, though not necessarily on Friday.)
(Update 2: It’s out! But unless you’re one of a very select group of famous Twitter users, you’re going to have to wait a week to use it.)

The app suggests artists and tracks to users based on a number of personalized signals, including the Twitter accounts a user follows on the microblogging service. Users will be able to listen to clips of music from inside the app, using third-party services like iTunes and SoundCloud; they will also be able to watch music videos provided by Vevo, the music video service owned by Universal Music and Sony.

Earlier today, Twitter acknowledged that it had acquired music recommendation service We Are Hunted last year and put its staff to work building the new app.

Timing of the launch couldn’t be more appropriate. It’s the weekend that kicks off Coachella, the huge music festival presented every year in the middle of the California desert, attracting some of the music industry’s top talent.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/twitters-new-music-app-launches-friday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130410/apples-ouster-of-appgratis-is-just-the-start-of-an-app-store-crackdown/ http://allthingsd.com/20130410/apples-ouster-of-appgratis-is-just-the-start-of-an-app-store-crackdown/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:30:13 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=310469 Simon Dawlat, founder of AppGratis — the app-discovery application removed from the iTunes App Store this week for developer guideline violations — said he’s “in total disbelief” at Apple’s action. And it’s hard to blame him. There’s plenty of confusion over the AppGratis ouster, which seems somewhat capricious, coming as it did just days after Apple’s approval of the iPad version of the app.

Apple said AppGratis was removed from the App Store for violating clauses 2.25 and 5.6 of its App Store Review Guidelines, which forbid apps that promote apps other than a developer’s own, and prohibit developers from using push notifications to deliver marketing messages.* A paid distribution app, AppGratis did both of these things, by promoting apps built by other developers via a once-daily notification. But browse the store’s listings today, and you’ll find that plenty of similar apps remain. And they, too, appear to violate 2.25 and/or 5.6.

Why hasn’t Apple banished them as well?

Well, there’s a very simple answer: It’s going to. And soon.

Sources familiar with Apple’s thinking tell AllThingsD that AppGratis’ ouster was a first step in a broader enforcement action generally targeted at app-discovery apps that run afoul of clauses 2.25 and 5.6.

I’m told that Apple feels that these apps threaten the legitimacy of the App Store charts by providing a way for developers to spend their way to a high ranking. Apple did something similar in 2011, when it rejected a number of applications running incentivized app installs within their apps.

The company also worries that such apps undermine the integrity of the App Store by cluttering it with alternative storefronts. As one source described it to me, some of these discovery apps create a scenario that’s similar to walking into Nordstrom and seeing a Walmart inside.** I’ve also heard that these apps are somehow degrading or complicating Apple’s integration of Chomp, the app search and discovery company it acquired earlier last year. But I haven’t yet been able to confirm that.

So there you have it: Reason and rationale.

Apple’s removal of AppGratis, then, wasn’t some mid-level misstep or a furtive policy change that the company prefers not to explain. It was a straight-ahead compliance action.

If it has been confusing, it’s because Apple, while being quite clear in citing the rules it is enforcing, has been unclear and scattershot in their actual enforcement. In other words, the company’s misstep here was in not attempting a blanket action that would have left little room for confusion.

Evidently, however, that’s coming, though with almost 800,000 apps in the store, some offenders will likely fall through the cracks.

And AppGratis, despite the “far from finished” reassurances of its CEO, is almost certainly finished as an iOS app — in its current incarnation, anyway.

Apple declined further comment on AppGratis’ ouster. AppGratis did not respond to a request for comment.

* If that’s the rule, why is it okay for Facebook to do this? I’m not sure, but there is one obvious explanation.

** Apple could conceivably ban such apps, citing clause 10.2, which forbids apps that look similar to those bundled on the iPhone, including the App Store. But it’s not, and I’ve been unable to determine why.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130410/apples-ouster-of-appgratis-is-just-the-start-of-an-app-store-crackdown/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130409/appgratis-ceo-what-the-hell-happened/ http://allthingsd.com/20130409/appgratis-ceo-what-the-hell-happened/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:02:25 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=310353

Initially, I thought we’d been caught in an internal communication accident and not the victim of a supposed ‘ban on third-party apps.’

– AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat on Apple’s removal of his company’s app from the iTunes App Store

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130409/appgratis-ceo-what-the-hell-happened/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgratis-out-of-the-store-for-being-too-pushy/ http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgratis-out-of-the-store-for-being-too-pushy/#comments Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:26:39 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=309934 Apple has ousted a popular app-discovery application from its iTunes App Store, claiming the app circumvented App Store rules preventing applications promoting other apps and direct marketing.

On Sunday, AppGratis, which promotes paid apps by offering one for free everyday, abruptly vanished from the App Store without explanation or comment from Apple. This, just a week after Cupertino had approved the iPad version of the app. At the time of its disappearance, word on the street had it that Apple banished the app for violation of an App Store Review Guideline clause that states:

2.25 Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

And that was indeed the case — partially. Apple confirmed to AllThingsD Monday that it removed AppGratis from the App Store for violating clause 2.25. But it said that the app also violated clause 5.6.

5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

Apple declined further comment on AppGratis’s ouster, framing the move as a standard response to guideline violations. But sources close to the company say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure. “The App Store is intended as a meritocracy,” a source familiar with Apple’s thinking told AllThingsD.

In other words, app-discovery platforms are fine as long as they’re not built on paid recommendations.

In other words, app-discovery platforms built on paid recommendations aren’t going to fly with Apple.

This is a tough turn of events for AppGratis, which recently closed a $13.5 million Series A round of financing. But it’s also foreboding news for other apps with similar business models. Sources say that Apple is looking at them, too, and they could face the same consequences if they’re found to be in violation of 2.25 and 5.6. Recall that this isn’t the first time Apple has eighty-sixed a discovery app for running afoul of its guidelines. Last December it ousted AppShopper for violating 2.25.

AppGratis did not respond to a request for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgratis-out-of-the-store-for-being-too-pushy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130406/lucasarts-departs-windows-phone-grows-and-why-you-cant-resell-your-mp3s-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-33113-40613/ http://allthingsd.com/20130406/lucasarts-departs-windows-phone-grows-and-why-you-cant-resell-your-mp3s-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-33113-40613/#comments Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:00:48 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=309752

For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back at the Top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

1. Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
2. Here’s Why You Hate Your Cable Company
3. AT&T: Oh, Wait … About That Samsung Galaxy S4 Pricing
4. Samsung Says Apple’s Patent Damages Could Still Exceed $1 Billion
5. HD Voice Will Start Coming to AT&T Later This Year
6. You Still Can’t Resell Your iTunes Songs, Court Rules
7. Elissa Murphy, One of Yahoo’s High-Profile Tech Execs, Heads to Go Daddy as CTO
8. Henry Blodget Is Quietly Planning a Stunning Return to Wall Street
9. What’s Dell’s Bidding Process Really About? (Clue: It’s Not About Fixing Dell)
10. Windows Phone Gaining a Toehold in Some Markets

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130406/lucasarts-departs-windows-phone-grows-and-why-you-cant-resell-your-mp3s-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-33113-40613/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130401/you-still-cant-resell-your-itunes-songs-court-rules/ http://allthingsd.com/20130401/you-still-cant-resell-your-itunes-songs-court-rules/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:54:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=308193 In the U.S. it’s perfectly legal to buy a CD or DVD and then sell it to someone else — that’s the reason Netflix exists.

But when it comes to digital media, that doesn’t work. That’s the gist of a new Federal court ruling, which says that startup ReDigi can’t do what it says it can do — let users resell songs they bought on iTunes.

In a judgment filed Saturday, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan sided with Universal Music Group’s Capitol Records, which had sued ReDigi for copyright violation.

Sullivan’s argument, in a nutshell: Unless the copyright owner gives you explicit permission to do so, you can’t resell a digital media file. ReDigi used multiple arguments to support its case, including the “first sale doctrine” that supports companies like Netflix when it comes to physical goods; you can see Sullivan shoot them all down in his decision (also embedded below, courtesy Jordan Golson).

Sullivan granted a partial summary judgment in Universal’s favor, and told both sides to report back to him by April 12 for next steps.

Capitol Records v. ReDigi Judgment by MacRumors

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130401/you-still-cant-resell-your-itunes-songs-court-rules/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130330/adria-richards-response-facebooks-new-ad-plan-and-finding-the-next-steve-jobs-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-32413-33013/ http://allthingsd.com/20130330/adria-richards-response-facebooks-new-ad-plan-and-finding-the-next-steve-jobs-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-32413-33013/#comments Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:00:17 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=307983

Photo by Asa Mathat

For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back the top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

1. Yahoo Paid $30 Million in Cash for 18 Months of Young Summly Entrepreneur’s Time
2. iTunes Not Exactly Break-Even Anymore
3. Fired SendGrid Developer Evangelist Adria Richards Speaks Out
4. Another Reason Google Reader Died: Increased Concern About Privacy and Compliance
5. A Smarter Calendar for iPhone
6. BlackBerry’s Million-Smartphone Mystery Partner: Brightstar
7. Facebook’s New Ad Plan Is the Web’s Old Plan
8. New Flipboard: News and Posts Handpicked and Shared
9. Sony’s High-End Xperia ZL Comes to U.S. at a Hefty $719
10. Q&A: Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell on Innovation, the “Next Steve Jobs” and Why Mobile Games Are “Over”

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130330/adria-richards-response-facebooks-new-ad-plan-and-finding-the-next-steve-jobs-the-allthingsd-week-in-review-32413-33013/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130327/big-media-flexes-its-muscle-and-justin-timberlake-sells-a-lot-of-music/ http://allthingsd.com/20130327/big-media-flexes-its-muscle-and-justin-timberlake-sells-a-lot-of-music/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:00:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=307041 From the Big Old Media Still Has Some Legs file: Justin Timberlake sold 968,000 copies of his new album in the last week.

That kind of first-week sales stat used to be no big deal for the music industry, back when people routinely bought music. In 2000, the year sales peaked, Justin Timberlake and the rest of ’N Sync sold more than two million copies of an album in a debut week, and people like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys would put up similar numbers.

Since then, of course, music sales have fallen apart (though the decline may have stopped). Just as important, the idea of a media monoculture — where everyone watches or listens to or reads the same thing — has atomized, courtesy of Facebook and Twitter and 500 channels on TV and an infinite number on YouTube, etc.

So, at a minimum, the success of “20/20” reminds us that, on occasion, lots of people are still interested in the same thing.

Especially if that thing comes out on a big label — Sony’s RCA — and is supported by a promotional blitz that includes a David Fincher-directed video, a “Saturday Night Live” appearance, a week-long stint on “Jimmy Fallon”, a Target campaign, a Bud Light campaign, appearances at Super Bowl and South by Southwest events, etc., a huge push from radio, etc., etc.

Wait a minute, though. What about Alex Day, the YouTube star with no record label and no Big Media promotional support, who beat Justin Timberlake on iTunes?

That was the story James Altucher wrote up on TechCrunch last week. And it’s a pretty great one, in part because Day is a great interview and in part because Altucher is a great writer.

But it’s not exactly true.

There was indeed a point in time where Day ranked ahead of Timberlake on the iTunes U.K. album charts. But the thing about iTunes music charts is that they don’t tell you how many units anyone has sold in aggregate, or even over a week or a day. They just provide a snapshot of how different acts are performing, relative to each other, in something close to real time.

That is — at some point this month, Alex Day was moving more units than Justin Timberlake. For a couple hours. Or maybe even longer.

But not much longer. Timberlake’s album hit the top spot on the U.K. chart within a couple days of its release. I haven’t seen anyone spit out an iTunes sales number for either artist, but so far this year, he’s sold more albums in the U.K. than anyone else.

Which again, isn’t to diminish what Day has done. His unsigned-ness has now become part of his story/marketing, but there’s nothing wrong with maximizing your assets.

And lots of artists who do break on the Web end up signing with a big label anyway, so more power to Day for making it work on his own.

But sometimes it also helps to have a giant label and an even bigger marketing apparatus working on your behalf. Ask Justin Timberlake.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130327/big-media-flexes-its-muscle-and-justin-timberlake-sells-a-lot-of-music/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130325/itunes-not-exactly-break-even-anymore/ http://allthingsd.com/20130325/itunes-not-exactly-break-even-anymore/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:00:20 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=306193

Horace Dediu/Asymco

Conceived as a low-margin “break-even” operation intended to drive hardware sales, Apple’s iTunes Store may be evolving into a significant profit center for the company, thanks to the addition of some new content categories. One in particular: Apple software.

While Apple’s margins on music, video, book and app sales through iTunes remain in the low single digits, the margins on software like the iWork and iLife suites, Final Cut Pro, Aperture and the like are much higher.

Now that Apple has folded its software group into iTunes, those products — which were once sold as boxed software — are sold though the Mac App and iTunes App stores. And, as Asymco’s Horace Dediu notes, that has significant implications for iTunes margins.

Dediu figures that Apple-made software sales were about $3.6 billion in 2012. If Apple’s profit margins on those sales is in line with industry norms — about 50 percent — then the profit margin for the iTunes business overall increases to the point where it’s no longer simply breaking even. Said Dediu, “iTunes inclusive of Apple’s own software generates as much as 15 percent operating margin on gross revenue.”

According to Dediu, iTunes had $13.5 billion in revenue in 2012; 15 percent of that is a little more than $2 billion.

Hell of a way to break even.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130325/itunes-not-exactly-break-even-anymore/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130320/waiting-for-the-cord-cutting-numbers-to-show-up-keep-waiting/ http://allthingsd.com/20130320/waiting-for-the-cord-cutting-numbers-to-show-up-keep-waiting/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:26:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=305427 As long as we’re talking about cord-cutting, or the lack of it, today, here’s a new report that won’t make either the cable guys or Team Kill the Cable Guys happy: Pay TV subscriber ranks grew — but just barely — in 2012.

That also isn’t a surprise, since it fits the no-growth trend we’ve seen from pay TV for several years now.

For the record, SNL Kagan figures that the U.S. pay TV industry — cable, telco and satellite — grew by a teeny-tiny 46,000 subscribers last year.

That’s basically negligible given an installed base of 100 million pay TV households. But it’s not a decline.

And it’s also in line with what we’ve seen from the industry for a while, where subscriptions go up and down each quarter — usually up in Q1 and Q4, and down in Q2 and Q3. And as always, it’s important to note that this is for all the pay TV platforms.

You might read today, for instance, that Kagan says the cable guys — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, etc. — lost 1.66 million customers this year. True! But the telco guys — Verizon and AT&T — and the satellite guys — Dish and DirecTV — added the same number. Hence, no growth.

As always, the real debate is about why there’s no growth. There are three standard answers, which don’t necessarily negate one another:

• 100 million pay TV customers is the size of the U.S. market, period. It’s just not going to get bigger.
• The market would be bigger if the economy was better, and more people were buying homes instead of “doubling up.”
• People are ditching pay TV for the Internet and some combination of Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, etc. And/or the population of “cord-nevers” — college grads who have grown up with Web TV and see no reason to pay for cable — is growing.

The last one is certainly worrisome for the pay TV guys, and the ones who used to boast that they see no evidence of cord-cutting are a lot more muted about it these days.

You’ll occasionally hear a top pay TV executive — like Dish’s Charlie Ergen — talk candidly about the fact that there are lots of kids, like his own, who aren’t paying for TV anymore. But as always, for right now, cord-cutters are like vegans — you may know a lot of them, but the rest of the country still eats a whole lot of Big Macs.

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