Reporter's Notes from Interview with Steve Jobs

Posted by: Peter Burrows on January 16

My posterior had hardly hit the couch for my post-keynote interview with Steve Jobs when he ribbed me: “Well, I guess your story looks pretty dumb.” He was talking about a story Ron Grover and I did earlier this month that suggested Apple would probably not be able to get Universal and Sony to support Apple’s new movie rental service.

I still stand behind that story. As I told Jobs, we had multiple reliable sources. But Jobs insists there was far less drama involved than we, and some other pubs, suggested. While he allows that those two studios weren’t the first to come to the table, he claims there were no great obstacles to overcome once they arrived, and that there was no race to the finish line to get deals inked in time for Macworld. Rather, all of the major studios saw the value in opening up this new channel to distribute their flicks. Jobs says that includes Jeff Zucker over at NBC Universal, the same man that pulled his company’s content off of iTunes last Fall, and who later said that he feared Jobs was going to ruin the video business the same way he’d “destroyed the music business.”

Jobs also shared his thoughts on some other topics. For one, he says he expects that over time, the studios will relent in their opposition to simultaneous release of DVDs and on-line distribution on the same day. As of now, Apple has to settle for a thirty day delay, to give studios time to rack up DVD sales (Jobs wouldn’t comment on the comparative economics—that is, whether online distribution was more or less profitable for the studios than DVD sales).

Jobs says he is hopeful that other studios will follow 20th Century Fox’s lead, by agreeing to let Apple encode a Fairplay-compatible copy of Fox’ movies on its DVDs (by the way, as some readers predicted, Apple did not have to license Fairplay to Fox to make this possible—a question I raised in a recent post). “It’d be great if they did, because this is a great middle path” that enables the studios to sell DRM-protected DVDs in a way that still gives consumers some reasonable flexibility. “People think they should have the right to put movies they buy [on DVDs] onto their iPods,” says Jobs. This approach “keeps honest people honest.”

As for NBC Universal, Jobs predicts that the stalemate won’t last forever. “We’ll put it back together on the TV thing. Everybody lost (when Zucker pulled his content off iTunes). But NBC is a great company, and Apple is a great company,” neither of which make a habit of ignoring their customers’ desires, he said. “Fortunately,” he half-joked, “there was a writers’ strike, so it didn’t matter as much as it might have.”

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