Apple gets a 30 percent cut on all sales from outside companies going through its iTunes system. It's a sweet money-maker for Apple, but not everyone is happy with the arrangement and, as recent events show, some are taking steps to cut Steve Jobs and company out of the equation.
Walmart, which just this week waved the white flag of surrender in its competition with Apple's iTunes in the digital music download business, has decided to make its Vudu video service available through the iPad browser, but it is not developing an app for the purpose.
The upside, obviously, for Walmart is that it gets to either pocket the money not paid to Apple and/or lower its price in a market share push.
On the downside, not all videos streamed by Vudu, most notably Disney films, will be available for the iPad. Some other content from other studios will not be available in HD.
Walmart is not the only company looking to get around Apple's 30 percent cut.
Amazon.com announced the launch of a Kindle Cloud Reader that allows consumers to read e-books using only their web browser either online or off. The Cloud Reader is available for Safari on iPad or desktop.
"We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser. The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you're using - from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we've added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books." said Dorothy Nicholls, director, Amazon Kindle, in a press release.