aa gained popularity around the turn of the century, a mainstream market for these products was not established. In January 2001, Apple Inc. introduced iTunes to record music in, as well as convert digital audio (CDs) into, the MP3 format. This was soon followed in October 2001 by the introduction of the iPod product to store and play MP3 files. This became the first popular MP3 music player, supported by a well-known brand and a platform where music could be produced and purchased. In addition, Apple's strategy in disaggregating music albums into individual songs and selling them for as low as 99 C through the iTunes platform complemented their iPod product. The iTunes platform and iPods became very popular in a very short time. Steve Jobs famously promoted iPod as a portable music player that could carry 1000 songs. With a reasonably high audio quality, iPod's competitive advantage over portable CD players was great. The market for CDs as well as CD players has greatly shrunk since their peak in 2000. Apple has built on the success of the iTunes music platform by adding further features such as music file metadata (such as information on music and CD covers), and video such as films and TV programmes. Furthermore, radio programmes are now commonly 'podcast' in MP3 format. With the release of the iPhone in 2007, the iTunes platform has been used for music and video streaming, and application management. From Analogue to Digital Apple is now a major player in the broadband tele- communications ecosystem as a content provider due Content and services layer to its strategic use of MP3 technology. The main advantage of MP3 over CD was its much smaller Connectivity retail layer file size at the expense of some quality degradation. Efficient source coding offered by MP3 was exploited Infrastructure layer and packaged in a way acceptable to music producers and easy to use by consumers. The ensuing success of Subscriber/End-user iPhone and iPad devices is in part due to iPod and MP3. Case study Questions Why was the MP3