The dominant position in movie and TV show rental and sales once enjoyed by Apple’s iTunes store has eroded steadily over the last five years, with U.S. market share falling from over 50% in 2012 to between 20% and 35% today.
So reported the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous data sources. The paper, however, did get Apple to confirm that market share has been ceded.
“Comcast and Amazon have been quite aggressive of late and taken quite a lot of the business,” said Dennis Maguire, a former president of home entertainment for Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures.
The WSJ’s studio sources said that Amazon has grown its market share from video transactional services to around 20%. Comcast, which has made movie sales and rentals a robust feature in its X1 platform, now occupies around 15% of the market, they said.
For its part, Apple said that it’s actually making more money than ever from renting and selling movies. But a rising tide has lifted all boats. Last year, transactional revenue tied to video purchases increased 12% industry-wide to $15.3 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers data.
An Apple rep told WSJ that the company is now focused on providing users apps to popular services like Netflix through iTunes app store.
Bernstein Research estimates that iTunes video, music, book and magazine sales generated $4.1 billion in revenue in 2016.