Steve Jobs on iTunes Movies and iTV: The Living Room Push

Apple does it again. First came music and TV shows, and today the tech giant unveiled its long-awaited movie service on iTunes. It allows customers buy movies from the Disney Studios for between $9.99 and $14.99 apiece. Apple also today introduced a new iPod, Nano, which is expected to retail for between $149 and $249. Take a look at Apple stock today. We had a pretty good day for technology. Apple included up 24 cents, one-third of one percent. Over the past year, it is up more than 40 percent. Take a look at that chart. The products mark Apple's latest salvo in the battle for your living room. CBC Silicon Valley reporter Jim Goldman with more in San Francisco. Jim? Hey, Maria. Good evening to you.

We're really happy with our iPod sales. I mean, you know, iPod sales are seasonal, so we're going into the holiday quarter, which is, for the last two years, been our biggest quarter. And so, you know, we have good expectations for how many iPods we're going to sell next quarter, but we're in uncharted territory. I mean, we've never sold this many of anything before. And so we're learning as we go, but so far we're pretty happy. Well, cue those famous San Francisco sirens as I tell you that Apple also unveiled its long-awaited download movie service, starting with 75 feature films from Disney and all of its major studios. Downloaded video, a big deal for Apple. Forty-five million TV show downloads in less than a year, and Apple sees movie downloads as certainly the next big thing.

Apple also showing off something called iTV today, a way to wirelessly transmit music, TV shows, and, again, now movies from your PC directly to your television. The $299 box available early next year, what Jobs calls the last major piece of Apple's digital puzzle. Jobs also addressing today the stock options backdating scandal, for the first time publicly forcing Apple to restate its earnings going back to 2001, denying again for the very first time today that the company faces any other investigations other than its own internal probe. We're mostly focused on our own house right now, and we're not under investigation by the SEC or anyone else. But we did discover, you know, with all the press around this, we started our own investigation, and we did discover some irregularities.

And we're, you know, letting that investigation have its due course, and it will be completed in the not terribly distant future. So, you know, we're not really talking about it until that investigation's done, just to give them the benefit of doing a completely independent investigation. All of the new products that Apple announced will be available today, save for that Shuffle, which will be available next month, just in time for the all-important holiday shopping season. That new wireless television device that really is generating quite a bit of buzz around here should be available sometime during the first quarter of 2007. Maria, back to you. All right, Jim, thanks very much. Meanwhile, NBC making a...