Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Movies are going well for Apple too. Over 50,000 are being rented or purchased every day, allowing Apple to claim it has the world's most popular online music store.
But in the great scheme of things, 50,000 movies a day doesn't seem particularly impressive. Part of the problem is the limited geographical availability - it was only earlier this month that Apple extended movie sales and rentals outside the US, initially to Canada and the UK.
Other issues include the speed provided by a potential customer's Internet connection, and the cost of iTunes movies compared with buying or renting a DVD.
The iTunes Music Store, as it was originally known, opened to US customers on April 28, 2003. It sold over one million songs in the first week. The original catalogue of 200,000 songs has now expanded to eight million.
Some observers describe the iTunes Store as a sideline that makes little money for Apple but that has propelled the iPod to market leadership. That overlooks the fact that the iPod was a top seller before the iTunes Store arrived.
In addition, research repeatedly shows that only a small proportion of the music on people's iPods comes from the iTunes Store - the rest is mainly copied from CDs or obtained from what are euphemistically called 'alternative sources' (peer to peer networks, copies made by friends, etc).
In fact, music piracy is iTunes biggest competitor, a problem that the music industry still hasn't resolved.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.