One of the many Apple stories getting traction over the past few days is an analyst note from Goldman Sachs, which mentions Google’s contribution to Apple’s services revenue numbers, as well as the idea of an Apple Prime bundle.
On Google, they paid Apple $9.6 billion for traffic acquisition costs (TAC), essentially paying for the privilege of being the default search engine on your iPhone.
On Apple Prime, the idea there is that Apple would create an Amazon Prime-like bundle to help bring more subscriber dollars to Apple, instead of Netflix, etc. This would obviously come into play when Apple rolls out their video offering later this year.
The stories out there (including this one), are takes on the Goldman Sachs analyst report. If you’ve got five minutes, watch the video below and get this straight from the horse’s mouth.
Damn, $9.6 bn in gravy from Google (or 1/3 of their profit).
An Apple Prime seems very plausible and it’s a proven model.
I’ve recently noticed, that iTunes movie downloads have increased their speed over the past 18 months. I have Verizon FiOS (GBE), am in Manhattan, and it currently takes about 2 minutes to download a ~5GB video file from iTunes. Where before it would take about ~8-10 minutes. So, they’re definitely beefing up their streaming infrastructure.