“This is real and it has Hollywood talking,” says Bryan Gonzalez, a project specialist with the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California. “Apple has learned a lot in its dealings with record labels, and it is taking its approach to television.”
But don’t think all this means that Apple is speeding down a deadend street to nowhere. At USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, Gonzalez has a prime perch overlooking the TV industry’s thinking, and, he says, between the Apple 99-cent rumors and continued chatter about Google’s television ambitions, “This has opened the eyes of a lot of people in the industry to the possibilities of digital distribution.” Up until very recently, “digital” in Hollywood meant piracy, period, end of discussion.
“Now “Internet TV is beginning to look real to studio executives,” says Gonzalez.