Now that's a collaboration

Nov 10, 2006 16:13 GMT  ·  By

Pixar's Cars is on track to be the industry's top seller in the U.S. during the 2006 calendar year. Walt Disney Co. claims to have sold over 5 million DVD copies of the movie in the first two days it was available for purchase in stores, AppleInsider reports.

This is not such a good news for the digital movie copies as it implies that hard copies, mainly DVDs, maintain a great distance and it shows that the majority of customers prefer having a DVD in its nice case on their shelves rather than buying and downloading them trough services like Apple's iTunes Store.

One should not get off course as the digital movie business is still a business, but it evolves at its own rate. Regarding digital movies, Disney said it sold 500,000 trough iTunes. Disney made 75 of its titles available on Apple's service less than two months ago, and 500,000 is still a big number if viewing from the time perspective. The digital movie traffic is slowly emerging, but it still has some impressive numbers to show that it's evolving.

For those that haven't already purchased their DVDs and want to use iTunes, Disney has added "Cars" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" to the list of titles available on iTunes Store. Both of them will be available for $12.99 for pre-order and for the first week on the store, after which the price will go up to $14.99.

AppleInsider reports that Disney chief executive Robert Iger told analysts during the company's fiscal fourth quarter conference call on Thursday that he expects to see a holiday boost for Cars merchandise which has been one of their biggest lines of the year.

If the digital movies are under the DVD movies' shadow, the TV downloads via iTunes have had a huge success in less than a year since they were introduced.

Over the last year, over 85 million of TV shows, movies and short films have been played or downloaded on iTunes. In addition, Iger announced that approximately 12 million ABC TV programs have been purchased since October, 2005 via iTunes.

We have done extremely well on the iTunes platform. We have launched on two other movie platforms and given some of the announcements that have been made this past week, we believe we will have opportunities to sell movies and television shows on many other new platforms, Igner stated.