Oh, these analysts certainly come out of the woodwork at times. The most recent example is Gleacher & Co. analyst Brian Marshall who postulates that Apple has about 475,000 daily rentals on iTunes compared to 2.6 million daily rentals via Netflix’s online streaming service.
Marshall’s worked backwards from Apple’s disclosure last week, in announcing it was close to selling its millionth AppleTV, that iTunes is seeing rentals and purchases of “over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day” to come up with a trend analysis. He assumes 90% of the TV shows are rentals, and 75% are movies. Mind you, there’s no exact explanation for those percentages, but there you have it. Out of this, he comes up with an implied $60 million per quarter for Apple rentals.
Marshall anticipates that if Apple can emulate Netflix’s growth from 2005 through 2010 (3.6 million subscribers to 16.9 million subscribers), Apple’s yearly revenue from iTunes rentals could reach $1 billion by 2015.
via Barrons
Thu, Dec 30, 2010
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