Might 9, 2005: Apple quietly begins promoting music movies within the iTunes Music Store.
The characteristic arrives with iTunes 4.8, initially providing bonus content material for individuals buying albums by the shop. It’s going to take several months for Apple to start out promoting particular person music movies, together with Pixar quick movies and a collection of TV reveals, for $1.99 a pop.
iTunes Music Retailer provides music movies
Apple’s choice to embrace video made excellent sense. YouTube was in its infancy (therefore individuals paying cash for music movies fairly than streaming them at no cost). Nevertheless, elevated high-speed web penetration lastly made video streaming a risk for peculiar customers.
In an try to compete with providers like iTunes, some report labels started promoting enhanced CDs round this time. The discs got here with music movies, wallpapers and different extras accessible by pc.
This format by no means actually caught on, although, because of the basic awkwardness of taking part in enhanced CDs. To entry the bonus options, you wanted to take the disc out of your CD participant, put it into your pc, after which navigate a (sometimes badly designed) interface to look at a quick MPEG video.
iTunes, however, made every part seamless. Downloading movies labored no in a different way than downloading music. There was no further step concerned. This ease of use made all of the distinction.
Music movies on iTunes
The primary music movies to indicate up on iTunes included a mixture of solo tracks and albums with extras: “Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz, The Antidote by Morcheeba ($9.90 for 10 songs, plus one video), “Warning Shots” by Thievery Company ($1.98 for one track and one video), Stand Up by Dave Matthews Band ($11.99 for 14 songs, one video and one PDF) and “Pink Bullets” by The Shins ($1.98 for one track and one video).
The video high quality wasn’t at all times wonderful. In contrast to the high-def high quality of right now’s iTunes video downloads or Apple TV+ video, some music movies got here at a measly 480×360 decision. Nevertheless, making them extras as an alternative of premium content material allowed Apple to iron out the kinks earlier than charging cash for video downloads.
By that point, Apple had launched the fifth-gen iPod Classic. That machine launched video playback — confirming video as a particularly necessary a part of Cupertino’s content material choices.
Apple Music TV
Today, Apple is deep into the streaming sport. Constructed on the $3 billion acquisition of Beats, subscription service Apple Music launched in 2015. Video was at all times within the combine, since Cupertino folded some music documentaries into the service. After which Apple TV+ followed in 2019. A 12 months later, Apple flipped the change on a free 24/7 streaming music video service known as Apple Music TV.
What was the primary video obtain you made by way of iTunes? Depart your feedback beneath.