Advertisment

Apple's iTunes Market Share Stumbles in Online Video Sales

author-image
Rajkumar Maurya
New Update
apple itunes new

With the increased competition from Amazon, Comcast and other video service providers, Apple’s market share in the online video sales and rental industry has been dropped by half.

Advertisment

According to media reports, Apple's share for selling and renting movies, as well as other video content, has dropped to between 20 per cent and 35 per cent, down from over 50 percent as recently as 2012.

The rise of subscription-based services like Amazon Prime and Netflix contributed to a decline of four per cent in video-on-demand rental revenue.

Movie sales also suffered a decline, with purchase revenues growing 21 per cent to hit $3.5 billion last year as compared to a 29 percent year-over-year bump the year prior.

Advertisment

Owing to the Amazon Prime subscription service and rentals marketed through Amazon Video, Amazon’s overall video business grew approximately 20 percent.

Comcast, US’s largest cable provider witnessed a rise in its stake in the market to 15 per cent after it starting selling digital movies and television shows to customers in 2013.

Interestingly, the loss of market share is not uniform across genres, the report said. For example, iTunes is a top distributor of independent movies, as Apple promotes and signs exclusive deals for films made outside of the traditional movie studio system, sources said.

While, the US digital movie rentals and sales rose 12 percent to $5.3 billion in 2016, earlier media reports claimed that the iTunes video, music, book and magazine sales generated $4.1 billion in revenue.

During the fiscal quarter of 2017, Apple reported $7.04 billion revenue -- up from $5.99 billion in the same period last year – from services business, which includes iTunes, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Pay, Apple Care and the various App Stores.

sony
Advertisment