San Francisco: Steve Jobs' death leaves Hollywood without the trusted technology envoy who helped push the film, TV and music industries into the digital age.
In the 25 years after he bought George Lucas' digital animation business and renamed it Pixar, Jobs charmed, angered and cajoled Hollywood executives as he pursued his vision for digital entertainment. He clashed with former Walt Disney Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner over their movie partnership, while befriending Eisner's successor, Robert Iger.
Apple's co-founder relentlessly challenged the industry to change — ushering in the age of digital animation with Toy Story, upending the record labels with the iPod and the iTunes store, and by neg-otiating to sell TV shows and films online. Disney's ABC was the first to sign on.
"Steve and I were talking for months about delivering TV shows on iTunes, which is when he shows me the video iPod, and I said, ‘We're in!'" Iger said in an e-mail. "Movies were next, a year later. It was about what we wanted to do and what we felt was right for our business."
With the 2006 sale of Pixar, Jobs became Disney's biggest investor, with a stake worth $4.35 billion (Dh15 billion).
Hollywood executives resisted putting shows online. Piracy had devastated the music industry and iTunes' dominance of online music retailing gave Apple unprecedented influence over the record labels.
Determined
Jobs was determined to get the studios on board, said Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of News Corp's Fox Filmed Entertainment.
"He'd call up and say, ‘We've got to do this, this is the way to do it, and you guys aren't getting it,'" Gianopulos said in an interview. "We would banter back and forth, but we always found ways to work together. To his great credit, he would see an aspect of the film side, the media side, that he hadn't considered, and he would call back the next day and he would have figured out how to work that problem."
Today, iTunes is the top seller of online movies, with 66 per cent of the market for electronic sales and Web video-on-demand, researcher IHS said in August. Its share of US music retailing was 70 percent last year, according to NPD.
