Disney CEO touts new iTunes movie downloads
Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger on Tuesday said the
company sold 125,000 movie downloads worth $1 million in revenue through Apple
Computer Inc’s iTunes online music store in the first week Disney movies
were offered.
Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger on Tuesday said the company sold 125,000 movie downloads worth $1 million in revenue through Apple Computer Inc’s iTunes online music store in the first week Disney movies were offered.
Iger told a conference of analysts the company expects to take in $50 million in added revenue during the first year of the iTunes movie download program, which was unveiled by Apple on Sept. 12.
Iger said the number of films on iTunes would increase as Disney clears the broadcast rights to move them to the Web.
Iger told analysts at a Goldman Sachs conference that Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is Disney’s largest shareholder and a board member, has become a “sounding board” for Disney’s rapidly expanding digital content delivery options.
“He is a great adviser and someone I can turn to readily for advice in a lot of these areas,” Iger said.
Iger said Disney stood to benefit from further content sales through its Apple partnership when the computer company rolls out a device, code-named iTV, in the first quarter of 2007 that allows consumers to stream movies, music, photos, podcasts and TV shows from the Web to home media systems.
Disney will place its content on other digital platforms but “we are choosy in terms of partners we pick,” Iger said. “We have to believe the platform is going to work.”
Some folks [not in my neighborhood] may think this isn’t a big number. I went back and checked the intro of iTunes music. The first-week numbers — and projections — were almost identical.
Now that Disney is in place and making money — while iTunes continues discussion/negotiations with others [including Google] — the mechanism probably looks a lot less threatening to yon yclept movie barons, our friends in the MPAA.
Posted: Thu - September 21, 2006 at 05:49 AM