Apple's iTunes Store opens gates to users in India

NEW DELHI: It’s been a long time coming, but users in India can finally purchase or rent digital content (Indian and international movies or music) from Apple’s iTunes store.

To access the store, users can click on ‘iTunes Store’ after starting up the iTunes software on their computer or simply access the iTunes Store on their portable iOS device (iPod, iPhone or iPad).

This also means that the popular Apple TV device will now ‘work’ in India – with proper access to digital content and your own iTunes purchased content. Songs are priced at Rs 12 per track, music videos at Rs 15 each and movies are priced between.`290 to 490 (depending on popularity and resolution).

If you prefer, you can also ‘rent’ movies at Rs 80 (Bollywood) or Rs 120 (international). Once you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it and 48 hours once you start watching it — you can start and resume the movie within that time frame.

After you download and watch the movie, it disappears from your drive automatically. Purchased movies can be watched at any time, on any device, any number of times. For users who don’t have a credit card or don't want to use a card, the option is to purchase iTunes Gift Cards in denominations of Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500, Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000.

The gift cards can be either ecards, sent to the recipient over email or actual printed cards, delivered free. Also available at a subscription price of Rs 1,200 per year is the iTunes Match service.

iTunes Match uploads information about your entire music library online in iCloud, no matter how many songs you have in your devices. These include any songs you may have copied from CDs that you own or used to own.

Putting your music library in iCloud allows you to have one single, large music library that is accessible from all your devices – be it an Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, iPad or computer.