Apple Will Sell Disney Movies on ITunes, New IPods
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Apple Computer Inc. said it will start selling full-length Walt Disney Co. films over the Internet today and introduced a bigger iPod player on which to play them.
Apple’s iTunes store will sell new releases from Disney for $14.99 each, Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said today at an event in San Francisco. Older films will cost $9.99. The biggest iPod, with a larger screen and 80 gigabytes of storage to play movies, will sell for $349.
The movie service and new players may help Mr. Jobs, 51, extend his dominance of the market for digital entertainment as competitors including Microsoft Corp. target Apple for attack. Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit and Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. have already signed up more studios to sell or rent movies than Apple. Apple will start selling games on iTunes for $4.99, Mr. Jobs also said.
“It comes down to the consumption of the content on devices and the popularity of those devices,” the Jupiter Research analyst, Michael Gartenberg, said before the announcement. “Apple has the most popular mobile device on the market.”
Shares of Cupertino, Californiabased Apple fell 59 cents to $71.91 at 1:40 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. Burbank, California-based Disney, the second-largest U.S. media company, rose 31 cents to $30.08 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
Mr. Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder and sits on the company’s board.
The popularity of iPod will help Apple dominate movie downloads as it has with music and TV-show episodes, Mr. Gartenberg said.
“People forget at the end of the day the iPod drove people to iTunes, not the other way around.”
The new iPods will have brighter screens and longer battery life, Mr. Jobs said. New models will have storage of 30 gigabytes and 80 gigabytes, and batteries on the largest model will last as much as 6.5 hours, Mr. Jobs said.
Mr. Jobs also introduced new iPod Nano models with storage of as much as 8 gigabytes. The new Nanos will sell for $149, $199 and $249. A new iPod Shuffle will have 1 gigabyte of storage and sell for $79.
