Apple’s success in wooing Twentieth Century Fox finally gives the electronics giant hope that it can win over the movie business, which has looked at iTunes’s stranglehold over digital music with nothing short of alarm.

Meanwhile, Warner Music confirms that it has abandoned copy protection for digital music, ultimately because of pressure from Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive - exactly the kind of leverage that the studios are so nervous of.

Until now Apple has been able to persuade only Disney to sell and rent programmes online, in agreements mainly encompassing Disney television hits such as Lost and Desperate Housewives. But given that Jobs is on the Disney board, after selling Pixar, his animation studio, to the House of Mouse, it was not surprising.

The motivation of Fox, owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, has not yet been spelt out, but the film studio’s obvious hope is to create a new pay-per-view window. But it is also a recognition that Apple remains the clear leader when it comes to developing compelling portable consumer electronics.

Although video iPods will struggle to sell films and television if there is nothing to watch, it is also hard to imagine that any other technology company can match Apple’s design flair. Plus a tie-up with Microsoft, the obvious alternative, is hardly reassuring for the studios, either - the Redmond-based group has a long history of dominance itself. This is not to say that Hollywood doesn’t have cards of its own, as it embraces Apple. Music companies are smaller and weaker than the studios, which are all part of large conglomerates. Jobs could pick off the crisis-stricken EMI and make it abandon copy protection, gradually forcing the others to follow suit.

Plus, people watch films on the largest screen in the house, not, usually, on small iPods. IPods can be hooked up to the television, but there are other ways of getting pay-per-view films to the box in the corner of the living room, too. In that arena Apple should face competition from traditional pay TV.

Yet bringing in Apple inevitably will lead to some change in the balance of power between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Tinseltown needs to work with the technologists, but in doing so it cedes some control over standards. If Jobs’s track record means anything, at some point he will try to exploit it. The battle will make for interesting watching.

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