Peter’s Blog

Apple sizes up Europe’s movie-rental market - International Herald Tribune:

After introducing a new online film rental service for American consumers last week, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, said he was “dying” to expand the program to international markets, adding that this would happen later this year.

Such an extreme sacrifice will probably not be necessary; but in trying to establish European versions of the iTunes movie rental service, which allows users to rent films over the Internet and stream them to their computers or televisions, Jobs at times might feel as though he were banging his head against a brick wall.

Apple will have to confront legal and regulatory hurdles, copyright challenges, scheduling conflicts and technological issues that demonstrate that the European media landscape remains a patchwork of several dozen individual countries - not the single “internal market” that the European Commission envisions.

It might be a funny question to ask, but will Apple (and Commission push-back) be the one responsible for creating a true single market in media in the EU?

From Top 15 Terminal Commands for Hidden Mac OS X Settings:

2. defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES
Normally the arrows next to artists and albums in your iTunes library search the iTunes store when you click them. This command changes them so that clicking will search your iTunes library instead. Put NO at the end to reverse.

This is so nice!