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Warner Bros and Apple have created an app to sell Inception directly
The war for the living room I
f you are talking location and sex appeal, the hamlet of Maiden is about as far removed from Hollywood as you could get in the US. Yet this rural backwater in North Carolina is
shaping up as a key battlefront in the fight for home entertainment hegemony. Maiden is the site of an anonymous hulk of a
building which comes online this spring. Built at a cost of $1bn, Apple’s 500,000 sq ft server farm is the world’s largest single data storage and processing facility. The best place to see this enormous slab of white concrete is a local church cemetery, a vantage-point steeped in metaphori- cal significance. If Apple prevails, this will be the graveyard for any number of set-top boxes, not to mention packaged film media as we have come to know it since the advent of video cas- settes and shiny disks. Officially, Apple says this data centre will be
deployed primarily on its iTunes and MobileMe services for accessing and storing music, movies, photos and other content. But that tells only part of the story: a hub this size only makes sense if
Apple is planning a full-scale media assault based around content streaming as well as sim- ple downloading. Apple customers would have constant on-demand access across any viewing device to both their media libraries and an end- less storefront of new material available for pur- chase, probably through impulse buys and tiered subscriptions. Gone is the headache of keeping pace with changing technologies and formats, and ensuring everything is retrievable in the net- worked household. In effect, North Carolina becomes the mother
of all media lockers, providing customers with a permanent back-up of their collection in the cloud. It also paves the way for an on-the-fly live streaming future in which real-time social net- working comes ready-baked into the viewing and listening experience. Apple already has one major ace up its
sleeve. When CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off the new iPad 2 in early March, he revealed Apple has more customer credit card details than anyone else on the web. More than 200
n 48 Screen International at the Cannes Film Festival May 12, 2011
‘Games consoles are really going to take off as a device to watch
films and TV’ Simon Calver, LoveFilm
Can the likes of Google and Apple overthrow the cable TV establishment by creating a simple way for customers to access content directly through web browsers? Colin Brown believes so
million customers can buy content with just a single iTunes click. To put that number in perspective: Netflix has
slightly more than 20 million subscribers in North America; while PayPal has 94 million active accounts globally (Amazon does not pub- lish its numbers). That massive customer base has already made Apple the biggest player in indi- vidual digital film transactions, with more than 60% of total transactions. Apple now generates more money for Hollywood studios than many traditional cable television operators including Time Warner Cable. By 2014, it will surpass Com- cast as the largest provider of video-on-demand. In March, Apple struck a deal with Warner
Bros to create a new app edition of two films, The Dark Knight and Inception, for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Customers can download a free app which allows them to buy the films for unlimited streaming, without going through iTunes — crucial to reach those viewers in terri- tories without an iTunes store, such as China and Russia.
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