Apple further muddies the future of watching movies!
So, did you drink the Kool-Aid this afternoon? I spend my seemingly annual ‘lunch hour in front of the computer’ checking out whatever Steve Jobs had to offer, and there was some pretty interesting stuff regardless of what segment of the electronic entertainment industry gets your blood flowing.
There were a number of cool hardware and software announcements, including:
– The Macbook Air: this think and light wonder is a thing of beauty, with serious laptop specs in a subnotebook package.
– Time Capsule: an advanced wireless router with loads of connections for direct hookups, printers, and something new – a built-in hard drive! You can get it with either 500GB or 1TB. Considering I currently use a 250GB FireWire drive, this has me drooling.
– Enhancements to the iPhone including a new Maps app that utilizes GPS for locations, enhanced text messaging, web clips and a bunch more.
– Enhancements to the iPod Touch that bring even more iPhone features to the device via WiFi – for $20.
– New software for Apple TV that greatly enhances the device’s interaction with the owner’s iTunes account for buying and renting all sorts of media.
Renting?
Oh yeah, there is that … the worst kept secret of iTunes, which everyone has just been waiting for since videos have been available on the service. The bottom line is that you can now rent movies on iTunes and watch them on your Mac, PC, iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Video rentals are $3 for ‘library’, $4 for ‘new releases’ and $5 for ‘HD new releases’.
Of course the devil is in the details.
The first stipulation is that you can download them and hold them for 30 days, but once you press ‘Play’ you have 24 hours to watch the feature before it expires. This makes the service pretty much the same as doing a $4 ‘On Demand’ from Comcast or $4 Pay Per View through DirecTV. And it was similar in a way to how things worked on Netflix – when they restricted your hours of viewing ‘Watch Now’ content based on your subscription plan. Of course, now Netflix offers unlimited online viewing for all but one of their subscription plans.
There is also the detail that you can only rent HD movies from the Apple TV, and that you cannot share them with your PC or Mac – so if you were planning to use your 30″ Apple Cinema Display … think again.
I have yet to see what my kids think about this – they have brand new iPod Nanos (the video ones) which they loaded up with movies and TV shows from the iTunes store before our trip to Disney. I cannot picture them grabbing something for a day, but perhaps I am wrong. It seems to me that this sort of thing will prove a fairly marginal business model … but then I have no idea how Comcast and DirecTV do with theirs. What Jobs made clear was that movie and TV sales over iTunes, while a clear market leader, were disappointing.
To me this highlights all of the confusion around how we’ll be watching movies five years from now – will be be HD-DVD or Blu-Ray or direct download or some other thing? Apple did nothing today to answer that – they will certainly open up another revenue stream for themselves, but not much else.
What do you think?
January 15th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Nothing about games for iPhone? I don’t get it.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Kind of a yawner. The AirMac looks sweet but hard to justify at that price especially when the one I really want is $3k. $1800 for a SSD would have been tempting. I want to hear more about the battery life though. Is the 5 hours real-world or Apple’s best case temperature controlled laboratory number?
Time Capsule is sweet. I’m interested. I don’t have a wireless N computer though so probably will wait on that. I’m a bit surprised at the price. It’s aggressive for Apple.
ATV is still the slick product I don’t really feel the need to get. The movie rentals stuff is nice, but I still see it as paying $230 more and paying more than I do now for movie rentals in exchange for not having to get off the couch to get a movie. Since I’m out of the house daily grabbing a movie isn’t much of an inconvenience. Plus I either pay $1/night for a DVD from a Redbox machine or I get one from Blockbuster for $4, but have up to 7 to start and stop it as much as I like. In other words I don’t like the movie rental terms for ATV. I would think they could offer more attractive terms given it’s digitally downloaded. I still think the model isn’t going to catch on fire. I just don’t see the hurry in getting this product. Since it doesn’t really revolutionize movie watching it’s just something that is going to be really price sensitive to the mainstream.
iPhone update is nice. Still a few things missing, but it’s coming along nicely. The Touch is also quite attractive. Maybe someone will make a super thin phone the size of the Touch and design it so it clips together with the Touch and together the two wouldn’t be much bigger than the iPhone. 🙂
I was hoping to hear about the iPhone2 and 3G.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
The whole Apple TV / rental / whatever thing does nothing for me. My kids were happy to grab a couple of iTunes movies for their new Nanos … but that isn’t my thing. There is an interesting article at the Times (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/itunes-movie-rentals-and-netflix-online-different-markets/index.html?ex=1358226000&en=6604bfd80b39ac02&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) about the different targets of the Netflix and Apple approaches. Guess I’m more of a Netflix guy.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Yeah I read that article. I think they should have asked whether folks are in that much of a hurry to switch from DVD to downloading movies. I know downloading is going to be the future, but it’s not all that attractive under the prices and terms I’ve seen so far.
I also read the first few comments yesterday where some Netflix customers just bought a long cable and run their laptops to their TVs for watching the streamed movies. 🙂 They claim it works well.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Meh. Amazon Unbox and the Netflix thing both let you do pretty much the same thing without tying you to iTunes (YUCK! [on PC at least]) or their proprietary hardware. Also, if I wanted to pay 5 bucks to rent a movie, I’d go to Blockbuster or use the XBox Live store. I can get Redbox or a number of Unbox movies for a buck — that’s a deal.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
James – I agree, but there are plenty of folks doing ‘pay per view’ on TV that meet the target audience.
January 21st, 2008 at 10:33 am
Just saw this: comparison of Commodore SX-64 to Macbook Air
http://regmedia.co.uk/2008/01/19/macbookcommodorecompare.jpg