Amaya Toman Currently, most users mainly use various streaming services to listen to music and watch movies, series and other shows. However, this was not always the case, and before the arrival of the Apple Music and Apple TV+ services, Apple users purchased media content on iTunes, among others. In today's part of our series called From the history of Apple, we will remember the moment when videos were added to iTunes in addition to music.
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On May 9, 2005, Apple relatively quietly launched the ability to download music videos as part of its iTunes Music Store service. The feature became part of iTunes version 4.8, initially offering bonus content for users who purchased entire music albums on iTunes. A few months later, Apple also started to offer the option of purchasing individual music videos through the iTunes service. In addition to these, users could also purchase short-length animated films from the Pixar studio or individual episodes of selected TV shows on iTunes, while the price of one episode was less than two dollars at the time. Apple's decision to include video content in the iTunes Music Store also made perfect sense at the time. The YouTube platform was practically in its infancy at the time, and at the same time, the quality and speed of Internet connections around the world began to increase, giving users more options in terms of downloading content.
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When major music labels noticed the rise of iTunes-like services, in an attempt to compete, they began offering enhanced CDs that could also be run on a computer and view bonus content. But this feature never caught on on a larger scale, partly because a lot of people didn't want to move CDs from the player to the computer drive just for the bonus content. In addition, the user interface of these CDs was usually not very good. On the contrary, in the case of iTunes, everything ran smoothly, with high quality, and above all clearly in one place. The process of downloading videos was no different from downloading music, and did not require any complexities or extra steps.
Among the first videos that Apple offered as part of its iTunes service were solo albums and tracks from artists such as Gorillaz, Thievery Corporation, Dave Matthews Band, The Shins or Morcheeba. The quality of the videos at that time probably wouldn't stand up from today's point of view - often it was even a resolution of 480 x 360 - but over time Apple has significantly improved in this regard. In addition to videos in SD quality, HD videos were gradually added for less than three dollars, and a little later, films also came.
