I think this portends things to come in the music space. An all-you-can eat subscription is SO compelling. Yes, people want to \”own\” their music right now. But that will change. If you can \”rent\” all the music in the world for $9.95 per month, tens of millions of people will do it.
We won\’t even think about \”owning\” vs \”renting\” in the future.
Steve Jobs always attacks the subscription model. But he also said no one would watch video on a 3\” screen. It\’s all part of his strategy to mislead the competition.
InformationWeek | iTunes | Apple iTunes To Sell Monthly TV Show Subscription | March 10, 2006
2 thoughts on “Apple finally does a subscription model”
If I understand Multi-Pass correctly, it’s not really a “subscription” in the sense of how the music industry is using the term (which is more like “renting”). The iTunes model is a subscription in the traditional sense of “prepaid purchase at a discount.” Like newspapers and magazines, you can keep the iTunes videos downloaded via Multi-Pass without paying any more money — you can cancel at anytime and keep what you’ve already downloaded.
There’s some discussion on this here:
http://ipodgarage.com/article.php?id=1058
Now, my opinion is that Multi-Pass will be very successful — proving people *still* want to own “their” music and movies. 🙂
You beat me to it Dan. This is quite different than what we have seen from subscription music offers.
More than anything, this is setting up for the Mac mini to be a media center. This will allow people to connect to their TV and rather than a automatic TIVO each week, one will have an automatic download each week that will be there when you want to watch it.