Apple’s best media moves

Dan Moren, writing for Macworld, digs into the Apple TV’s TV app, the Movies Anywhere service, and Apple’s Apple Books rewrite.

The whole piece is worth reading, but a few nuggets:

The big question mark hanging over it all is what exactly will happen when Apple’s own video streaming service launches. Will it take over the [TV] app, pushing the rest of your content aside? Or will it be content to share a place on equal footing with the other partners? For customers’ sake, I certainly hope for the latter.

I use my Apple TV all the time, but never use the TV app, mostly because of the lack of Netflix integration. If Apple can get Netflix buy-in, and avoid overwhelming the TV app when they fold in their own Apple-branded content, the TV app will become my first stop when I switch to my Apple TV.

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a major overhaul to its ebook platform, including a graphical update to the reading apps, a better store experience, and reading features that take aim at Amazon’s own Goodreads service.

That’s good because Amazon does continue to dominate the market and has little in the way of competition, and Apple is one of the few companies big enough to seriously challenge it. The real question is if Apple can do anything compelling enough to draw market share from Amazon.

I’ve long been an Amazon Kindle reader. I buy all my books from the Kindle store, do most of my reading on my iPad. But this new version of Apple Books has my attention. A central issue for me is the ability to share books with my family, something Amazon only recent started offering. Apple’s deal is much simpler, is already in place for me, and the Apple deal has none of Amazon’s limits.