04-12-2010, 02:53 PM
M A V I C wrote:
[quote=Winston]I don't think the Netflix comparison is complete. I think Netflix provides online videos as a free addition to its DVD rental business. (I suppose one could read that the other way around too, but the DVD rental business is older and larger.) So the total package of what one can access with a Netflix account is a lot larger than the number of streaming videos available. According to Wikipedia Netflix has 100,000 titles in its library.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix
This got brought up in reference to apps available on the iPhone. So keep that in mind. The iPhone doesn't have a DVD player
Sure, but most people who have iPhones have a DVD player, and a some of those have Netflix accounts. Having a Netflix account is made more valuable by having the ability to stream video, and including that at no cost on an iPhone is likely to cause some people to use that instead of paying for videos from iTunes. The Netflix app doesn't exist in a vacuum, just as iTunes on an iPhone is tied to having iTunes on a computer and being able to potentially play iTunes content on other devices makes it more valuable than if you could only access it on an iPod/iPhone. I think Netflix thus provides more competition for iTunes on the iPhone than if it existed solely as an iPhone service. People have Netflix for reasons beyond streaming to the iPhone, and that gives a bigger market for Netflix use on the iPhone.
- W