Sony hints at pulling music from iTunes
Sony introduced Music Unlimited in Europe last year and is slated to kick off the streaming music service in Australia soon. The subscription service has a library of 6 million tracks that can be streamed wirelessly to Sony TVs, Blu-ray players and the PlayStation 3 with support for portable devices and mobile phones in the future. Before this Australian launch, Michael Ephraim, the CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, sat down with The Age, a Melbourne-based newspaper.
During the course of the conversation, Ephraim confirmed that Sony needs to be in iTunes as that is the popular format right now. If Music Unlimited takes off as a streaming music service, Sony could withdraw from iTunes and invest themselves entirely in their own delivery system. ''Publishers are being held to ransom by Apple and they are looking for other delivery systems," says Ephraim, "Sony is waiting to see what the next three to five years will hold.''
These comments come fresh on the heels of a growing battle between Sony and Apple over the rejection of the Sony Reader application for the iPhone. The app was reportedly rejected from the App Store because it did not include a mechanism for purchasing ebooks within the application. Apple is rumored to be considering changes to its terms of service that would require publishers to sell their digital content within each publisher's iOS application.
[Via AppleInsider]
