Appletell

Since its introduction by Apple on January 9th, 2001, iTunes has become one of the most popular music library organization apps ever.  It started off simple and eventually became what it is today, a place not only to organize files, but to shop, learn, and watch.  With so much growth, large deals, and new features in the past few years, it makes me wonder where iTune’s place will be in the future.  When digital sales take over physical media, will it be because of iTunes?  Will iTunes one day start a revolution in how we purchase and handle all of our DVDs, music, and TV shows?  Or will iTunes eventually slip away into the past and be replaced by a whole new app or movement?

With the direction iTunes is headed now, it seems like it very well could be the driving force behind moving totally to digital sales for some.  It has one of the biggest music selections available anywhere, allows you to rent movies, releases new DVD titles the same day as hard copies, and contains all sort of other media, such as podcasts and TV shows.  With only a couple more deals and updates, iTunes could soon be the place to go for all of your media.  This would almost completely eliminate the need for physical media.  Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think this will happen anytime very soon, but it is possible.  But what would seal the deal for moving completely to digital media?

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Apple has been granted four new patents today by the US Patent & Trademark Office. The patents cover four inventions that relate to Apple’s multipurpose dock, QuickTime’s transmission of differently formatted media, measuring network bandwidth between two computers, and a communication between media servers and media clients.

Stand invention (US Patent D567800) does not offer a detailed explanation as to why this dock is much different than other docks on the market. Apple only provided a one sentence explanation in the patent filing: “The stand, which can be utilized as a dock, is used to support an electronic device, such as a media player, media storage device, cellular phone, PDA and/or the like.”

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Today, Apple celebrates the fifth anniversary of its iTunes store with a look back at “all of the great music, video, and exclusives” that users discovered on iTunes, and highlighting the songs and shows that defined each year of the iTunes store’s life. Apple gives a brief history along with a collection of “best sellers” on its iTunes store today, and claims its music catalogue grew from over 200,000 songs and a handful of exclusive tracks to over 10 million songs, according to information available on the iTunes store.

Earlier this month, Apple announced that the iTunes Store surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the United States, based on data from January and February of 2008. Apple also stated that it had served over 50 million customers and sold more than four billion songs.

iTunes makes up approximately 70 percent of digital music sold worldwide. It is estimated that in the next five years, Apple’s media service may account for a staggering 28 percent of all music sold worldwide.

Via [The iPod Observer]

ITV PLC, the U.K.’s largest free-to-air commercial broadcaster according to sales, announced on Tuesday that a selection of its programming is now available to buy or download from Apple’s U.K. iTunes store. The shows offered cost from £1.89 an episode and may be bought as a complete series, ITV said. The programs offered include Lewis and Cold Feet, Brideshead Revisited, and Captain Scarlet. Additional programming will become available in the UK iTunes store throughout the year.

ITV’s managing director of global content, Dawn Airey, said that the partnership with Apple shows that ITV is delivering on its strategy of making content available on multiple platforms. Airey, who was hired from British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC last May, is in charge of doubling sales of ITV programs and intellectual property to the international market by 2012. ITV’s global content division brings together all of ITV’s U.K. and international production and distribution businesses.

ITV’s broadband service has delivered 38 million videos since August of last year, according to ITV, and it also signed a partnership with online community Bebo to deliver premium ITV content to its 40 million users worldwide.

Via [guardian.co.uk]

This year, Apple is treating European journalists to watch a live broadcast of the Macworld San Francisco 2008 keynote via satellite. It will be hosted at the BBC TV studios in London, on 15 January 2008. The invitation, given to many respected media representatives around Europe, states the following ”Please join us on 15 January at 5pm for a special live satellite broadcast of Steve Jobs’ keynote address from Macworld San Francisco,”.

The fact that the media in Europe is being invited to see the event live may mean that this year’s keynote releases are likely to be worldwide. Because you don’t just invite media from another continent and make them jealous with products that are only available in the USA. Maybe movie downloads and rentals will finally make it to the UK and the rest of Europe. I’m definitely very excited about this year’s Macworld keynote - with the vast amount of patents Apple filed last year, it’s certain that they were working on something really cool - and I imagine that this cool product is going to be seen on January 15. Don’t forget to check Appletell on January 15, when we’ll have updates all day long from the keynote.

Via [Macworld UK]

At the fifth D: All Things Digital event, Steve Jobs revealed a software upgrade to the Apple TV that would allow customers to access YouTube’s thousands of clips through a wireless internet collection. You would not access the clips directly from YouTube, instead a team would host the videos in an Apple TV format, available for anyone to view. Users will be able to log in to their YouTube accounts, add favorites and use other features of the popular video-sharing site.

The video quality will be exactly the same as the ones on YouTube’s site which means the videos through an HDTV will be similar as to on your computer. There is a quality issue when watching very low quality content on a TV or display with a high resolution. Though, as Steve mentioned, people are finding ways to upload better content everyday. The update will be available in mid-June with only selected clips (i.e. Featured videos), with the whole YouTube library being available in the fall.

[Apple TV]