Wired Magazine report Apple’s announcement that they’re going to be setting up 6000 Starbucks Coffee Shops as wi-fi retail iTunes stores. This seems an important move for Apple, gaining them real-life retail square footage. The real-life aspect of this is key: it’s helping bridge the digital divide that currently means iPod customers with broadband-less or computer-less environments can’t access the iTunes store. Now they can (for a small pay-per-go fee I’m sure…) – at certain Starbucks. The size of the media servers and speed of the service will be essential to success, but as the Wired article suggests: if a customer can download video/lots of music tracks ten times faster in Starbucks than they can at home, then they’ll be queueing up for those Americanos – to stay. This should boost the confidence of arts organisations thinking of digitising content for sale by download, or considering pod/vod casting – the cappu-rati can certainly be considered as existing and potential arts audiences.
This article first appeared in Hannah Rudman’s blog 7th September 2007.
“Americano to stay, and 30 minutes on iTunes, please!”
