Apple Expands iTunes Movies in the Cloud to Over 35 New Countries [Updated]
In addition to today's iTunes Match expansion to Hungary and Poland, Apple has also undertaken a significant expansion of its iTunes in the Cloud feature, adding movies to the list of eligible items in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple has spent the past year prying open new storefronts territory by territory — 33 new App Store countries in July 2011, then 32 more territories across Africa, Europe and Asia-Pacific in June 2012 — and this move extends the same playbook from app distribution to owned-media entitlements: iTunes in the Cloud now serves movies in over 35 countries including the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The same day, iTunes Match reached Hungary and Poland, and the timing is not incidental — a confirmed expansion of Apple's Maiden, North Carolina data center campus is the infrastructure behind iCloud's growing footprint. The pickup was broad for an incremental feature change, with eight outlets from The Verge to iLounge carrying the story.
First-order effects
- Customers in the newly added countries can now re-download purchased movies to any authorized device without tethering to a synced computer, removing the last practical reason to treat an iTunes purchase as tied to one machine.
- iTunes Match subscribers in Hungary and Poland gain the scan-and-match catalog upgrade path, extending Apple's paid cloud-music tier into two more European markets.
Second-order effects
- Movie studios face renewed pressure on territorial licensing windows: once Apple treats a purchase as a borderless cloud entitlement, per-country rights carve-outs become the bottleneck and negotiating leverage shifts toward global all-media deals.
- Local download retailers and nascent streaming services in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand must match the re-download convenience or compete purely on catalog price, since Apple's ownership model now carries a built-in locker at no extra charge.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward Apple's revenue mix shifting further from one-time hardware and media sales toward account-bound services that raise switching costs — with data center capacity, not retail shelf space, becoming the constraint on international growth.
- If cloud entitlements keep preceding full storefront launches, expect rights holders to standardize contracts around 'available everywhere iCloud is,' eroding the region-by-region release model that governed digital film for the past decade.
The trend: Apple is converting one-time media purchases into account-tied cloud entitlements market by market, using data center buildout to make ownership portable across devices and borders.