Aiming to convert physical DVD bargain hunters to digital copy owners, Apple has set up a special “This Week’s Great Movies Under $5″ page on iTunes that will offer a few movies every week for $4.99 USD, a steep discount from their normal price point.
For the inaugural week, there are mainly older action movies such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Last Action Hero, Air Force One and The Karate Kid.
Although Apple has not made clear how long each discounted movie will last on the page, we can assume that it will be only for the one week period of Tuesday to Tuesday.
Result for: steep discount
It appears that the Apple iPhone isn’t selling as well as hoped in Germany , and in response Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile arm will be dropping the price of the media device 99 Euros for a promotional Period of two months.
The promotional period will begin on April 7th and end on June 30th and is a pretty steep discount from the device’s MSRP of 399 Euros. The company does note however that the price drop is only on the 8GB model. There is another catch to the price drop however. “Customers must agree to a monthly calling contract that costs at least 89 euros per month. Those opting for a new “starter” iPhone contract that runs 29 euros per month can purchase the phone for 249 euros during the two month period.”
After the price cut, Germany appears to be the first country where the iPhone price has fallen under the Apple suggested price suggesting lackluster sales.
Result for: steep discount
Wal-Mart has aggressively lowered the price today of their MP3 music downloads available from the Wal-Mart Music Downloads Store.
The service will now offer tracks for as low as 74 cents, a steep discount against market leaders iTunes and Amazon which offer most tracks for 99 cents.
From what I can see from glancing at the store (Wal-Mart MP3), the top 30 most downloaded tracks are priced at 74 cents while all other tracks cost 94 cents, a 5 cent discount from iTunes.
The new version of the store will also be available to more platforms (it was previously Windows and Internet Explorer only) and will now work on Linux, Macs, and browsers such as Opera, Firefox and Safari.
The move should help Wal-Mart compete with iTunes and Amazon although the retail giant’s catalog is lacking. iTunes currently has 8 million tracks available (with DRM however) and Amazon MP3 has 4.5 million while Wal-Mart only has 3 million.
