It appears that Apple has begun rolling out TV show and movie support for its iTunes in the Cloud service to a handful of new European countries this week. Users in France, the Netherlands and a few other European countries are reporting that they have just gained access to the feature, which allows you to access previously purchased content...
After the new iOS 6.1.2 firmware arrived this morning apparently solving battery woes caused by an Exchange bug, and following up on the just released Java update that has patched a major vulnerability which led hackers to break into Apple employees' computers, the Cupertino firm has just issued iTunes 11.0.2, a maintenance update. In addition to the various stability improvements and performance enhancements, the new version brings an all-new view for your music...
Well known and respected Asymco analyst Horace Dediu is out with a new report this week entitled 'Counting stool legs.' The piece takes a look at Apple's newly-introduced revenue categories—mainly iTunes, which now includes sales from OS X, iWork, and Apple's other pro tools.
The big takeaway here is that, under this new structure, iTunes can no longer be considered a 'break even' business. Because, as Dediu points out, the combined sales from iTunes and accessories is now bigger in terms of revenues than any other phone vendor, except for Samsung...
Hot on the heels of announcing 25 billion song purchases since the iTunes Store's inception nearly a decade ago, today Apple of California has conveniently kicked off a fitting Valentine's Day love music promotion.
The company has discounted some of its most popular love songs, which now cost 69 cents a piece. These music tracks span genres and decades, from artists like Aerosmith, Celine Dion, James Taylor, Kenny Chesney and Whitney Houston, to name a few...
Just in time for Valentine's Day $0.69 love music sale, Apple this morning issued a press release announcing that music lovers have downloaded more than 25 billion songs from the iTunes Store. The company's song sales now average to 15,000 tracks downloaded per minute. The iTunes Store opened for business on April 28, 2003 and its catalog is now over 26 million songs strong. Remember that it was only back in September 2012 that Apple announced 20 billion iTunes song purchases.
With the recent addition of 56 new markets, music on iTunes is now available for sale in 119 countries. And with the recent Apple TV 5.2 software update, owners of Apple's $99 set-top box can now see upcoming songs when playing music, choose what plays next and access their previously purchased songs from iCloud, right on their television set...
With Valentine's Day just around the corner, Apple's App Store yesterday launched a new Valentine's Day Gift Guide to highlight "some of the finest apps and games" for your significant other. The promotion ties nicely with the app gifting feature which was relaunched on iPhones, iPads and iPods last December. Should you choose to give the gift of apps this Valentine season, you can purchase your gift right now and have it delivered on Valentine's Day on any other date of your choosing...
Research firm NPD today issued a report highlighting Apple's lead concerning electronic sell through (EST) of digital movies. Now, EST comprised just sixteen percent of the larger video on demand (VOD) revenue throughout the 2012 calendar year.
At the same time, iTunes dominated the EST market with a 45 percent share. Amazon was #2 with eighteen percent, followed by the $3 Walmart-owned Vudu (fifteen percent), #4 Xbox Video (fourteen percent) and Others taking up the remaining eight percent of the market.
Movies on Blu-ray and DVD discs? These accounted for a still respectable 61 percent of home video spending on movies, excluding Netflix and other movie-streaming subscriptions. However, that figure is notably down from 64 percent in 2011, despite average prices of Blu-ray movies falling seven percent to $19.97 per unit. Steve Jobs was right, Blu-ray indeed is "a bag of hurt"...
Want to find restaurants and bars you'll like but are tired of getting reviews that the stores likely posted themselves? The problem with traditional crowdsourcing is the service tends to be anonymous, and you will get reviews from people who don't necessarily share your tastes.
Scoopt has a different crowdsourcing philosophy. It's an app that is designed to help you connect "with your favorite people's favorite places". Instead of comprehensive reviews from strangers, Scoopt gives you quick recommendations from friends you trust...
Hot on the heels of releasing the new iOS 6.1 software with iTunes Match improvements, Siri movie ticket sales and enhanced LTE carrier support, Apple just posted a matching firmware update for its $99 Apple TV set-top box.
As indicated back in December 2012, one of the biggest new features the new software brings out is awesome support for Bluetooth keyboards, making the little hockey-puck much more than a "hobby" device. Other improvements include enhanced iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Up Next. Go past the break for the full breakdown...
As we reported on Saturday, Gridlee is a freeware arcade game from 1982 which was re-released on the iTunes App Store by David Loureiro. This would have been unremarkable, if Gridlee was a straight port from the source code and if it wasn't actually powered by an up-to-date and fully featured version of MAME4iOS Reloaded.
This means if you have a program capable of tunneling into the iOS file-system through USB, you can once again have a working version of MAME on a non-jailbroken device, complete with your own ROM images. As I can't think of anyone who would legitimately want to play Gridlee on an iPad, this was likely an intentional attempt to sneak the emulator back into the App Store, so we're guessing Apple won't be hosting the file for too long. Grab it while you can...
You've probably seen beautifully captioned photos floating around Facebook and Tumblr, and thought you'd try your hand at making some of your own. The problem with making typography look good over a photo is it takes a bit of effort and design sense, so it's not for everybody. Or so we thought.
Quipio is a recently released app that allows users to make their own captions for their photos. If you just have some idea you'd like to share, Quipio can also take up to 400 characters of text and turn it into a simple piece of word art in less than a minute...
We know that some of our readers who updated to iOS 6, or those of you who upgraded to the iPhone 5, get annoyed when we feature jailbreak tweaks. In for each article about tweaks we get at least one comment along the lines of, "Why are you covering tweaks when there's no jailbreak!?!" It's totally understandable, since you can't take advantage of all the awesome tweaks we've showcased. Lucky for you, the clever developers at Renegade Apps have found a way to add functionality to the Lock screen without relying on MobileSubstrate.
Task Paper (not to be confused with the similarly named TaskPaper) is a to-do list app, available in iTunes, that allows users to create persistent Lock screen reminders through generated wallpapers. These wallpapers provide functionality similar to the Reminders+ tweak, all without a jailbreak...