After a strong first week on the new iTunes Movies service,
with over 125,000 paid downloads, Disney chief Bob Iger has said
he expects the company to make at least $50m on the service in its
first year. In the same week that a Disney subsidiary has begun to
experiment with allowing unencrypted downloads of an upcoming artists' album as an MP3 (ie files without
Digital Rights Management), the iTunes service (which uses Apples
FairPlay DRM system) netted the studio over $1m.
“We’re extremely confident that we’ll easily be able to
generate about $50 million in incremental revenue in the first year
putting movies on this platform — at no marketing expense to us and
very limited additional expense at all, the cost really of encoding the
film.” Iger told investors and analysts.
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