Apple Pitching $30 iTunes Movie Subscriptions

By Ed Sutherland (1:42 pm, Nov 02 2009)

Apple is reportedly talking with TV executives about delivering content via iTunes for $30 per month. The arrangement could start as early as 2010 and Disney may be the first studio to accept the offer.

According to MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, TV heads are “intrigued” but no programmer has made a firm commitment. The plan would bypass Apple TV for iTunes, which the Cupertino, Calif. company claims has 65 million accounts.

Disney is most likely to take Apple up on its subscription plan because of the tight cooperation the two companies have developed. Disney became the first studio to sell programming via iTunes in 2005. After the studio bought Steve Jobs’ animation house Pixar, the Apple CEO became Disney’s largest single shareholder.

In August, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicted Apple could unveil a subscription TV plan that would appear for between $30 and $40 per month.

[Via MediaMemo and AppleInsider]

7 comments »

About the author

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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http://bradyjfrey.com Brady J. Frey
$30 per channel or a set of channels? Very much the industry is going this way, but $30 a channel doesn’t make it cheaper than cable… or more convenient.
http://blog.iloveflycasual.com Jason
“The plan would bypass Apple TV for iTunes…”
Does this mean they’re actually considering not allowing this subscription service to work on Apple TV???
OlsonBW
For me this would have to include things like The Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, The Science Channel as well as the major networks.
One channel I would have no interest in would be MSNBC. Go figure. :)
OlsonBW
My minimum requirements is that they have to have a TiVo interface for iTunes. Sorry but the iTunes/FrontRow/AppleTV interface is just sad.
I have TiVo now. I left DirecTV for Cable because I couldn’t have HD TiVo with DirecTV despite DirecTV having better channels, etc. But when you have TiVo you really don’t care. TiVo IS the network as I don’t pay attention to what channel anything is on. If I run across something I like, I search for it by name and tell it to record it with either a season pass or just one time.
In comparison iTunes is a PITA. TiVo knows how to package it all together and what features to have. Apple still doesn’t have a clue.
Just my two cents.
No I don’t work for TiVo or any company connected with TiVo. I’m just a fanboy of TiVo.
iGenius
The headline says “Movies”, but the story is about TV shows.
Charli
$30 a month, no ads and covers all the current tv offerings plus hopefully some plans to get more, like showtime and HBO during the season. I’d be in for taking a look at that. but hopefully it would go onto the Apple tv as well as the desktop. just not only the Apple TV cause I think I might just put my new 27 inch on the media stand and ditch the old 20 inch tv for now.
http://disneymp3player.com disney mp3 player
Nice topic . Thank you for posting it !