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According to the Financial Times, months of talks between Apple and Universal, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros have stalled on this point. Apple currently allows content from Walt Disney - the only studio to have signed up to date - to be played on up to five authorised devices, such as Macs and iPods and, when it is released next year, the 'iTV'

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wireless television interface.

The report says that the movie industry wants to avoid the experience of the music industry, 'which has yet to recover from years of illegal digital piracy', although there is no evidence of any 'piracy' of content sold with iTunes' successful DRM technology. In fact unauthorised movie copying and distribution is already rife and has been for some time - the Motion Picture Association of America claims that it cost the industry $6.1 billion in 2005. Suggesting Apple should do something about it seems perverse in the extreme. Certainly you do not hear Disney complaining as iTunes sales add $50 million to its revenues this year.

But the studios argue that with the cost of a blockbuster film approaching $100m, they have more to lose than record companies.

'We're very willing to do a deal but we're keen to get some concessions from Apple that will account for the differences between the value of music and television content and feature film content,' an unnamed executive said.