As always I thoroughly enjoyed the Apple Event yesterday. Apple has continued to innovate within their product line and their software offering to provide the best experience for all of us Mac users. For me the biggest two announcements were the iTunes Movie Store additions to iTunes and the code named “iTV” product demonstration. So let’s start with the Movie Store.
Obviously we knew it was only a matter of time before they added movies. I was a little surprised they launched it without a means to truly enjoy the high quality wide screen movie outside of the computer. Meaning the new higher quality widescreen movies are not optimized for the current iPod Video. I viewed a demo of a movie purchased on the store playing on the current iPod video and the large black bars on the top and bottom were not pleasing. That being said let’s hope a new video iPod that is optimized for movies is on the horizon. I am very anxious to see how consumers respond to the video store. I myself prefer to buy my movies at retail and digitize them myself at DVD quality. Which leads us to iTV
Obviously Apple did something very different by not really announcing a product but more making their intentions known. The concept behind iTV is obviously nothing new. I have been able to stream pictures, music and movies to my TV for the past 5 years. What is new is that Apple has put a rock solid user interface on the TV to consume that digital content with. As well as tied it to the Internet for additional content feeds as well. Where Apple has really put the pressure on everyone else with this space is on the UI and the marriage to the leading digital content store in the world. No one else has that good of a UI and no one else makes it that easy from your TV to go out and get movies, music, trailers and a lot more I’m sure when they are done. At the very least Apple has helped generate consumer awareness of the need to move content off the PC and consume it in the living room. More interestingly Apple has shown me a path to not need a cable provider or at least not watch TV live any more. I am not sure if they will ever go down this road but if prices were lowered accordingly I could see myself subscribing to NBC, CBS etc for nominal fees to access all their content in the future. Or use the iTunes store as a way of catch up TV where I don’t need a DVR any longer.
There are many great concepts at play with this category and a very bright future. Again where others in this category should be worried is at retail. Apple can build a living room into all their stores and really present the best display for people on how easy it is within the Apple product ecosystem. No other brand can trust Best Buy or others to treat their product ecosystem like that.