iTunes goes to Hollywood

By - May 31, 2005 By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

iPod TV.jpgWith iTunes 4.8, Apple has quietly added video clip support. Now, any QuickTime movie can be dragged into a playlist in iTunes. This allows easy download, sorting and playback of digital video clips.

But the challenge for Apple is not getting content from the studios, or protecting it, or the technical details of distributing it. Rather, the challenge is to convert iPod and iTunes listeners into viewers.

This also begs the question: How quickly will iTunes replace NetFlix?


It should be obvious to anyone following the progress of downloadable video that the holdups are political and economic, not technical. It has taken a long time to make Hollywood comfortable with digital rights management for downloadable content - and it has been even harder to get consumers to pay for $4 movie downloads over pathetic US "broadband." Services such as CinemaNow have been providing downloadable movies for years, but they have not achieved mainstream penetration. In fact, they seem to be no more than elaborate proofs of concept for DRM technology.

The de facto standard approaches to video distribution, which reportedly make up some 50% of Internet bandwidth use, are of course the ubiquitous file-sharing networks. The current business model for these networks is a non-sustainable "sell ads and run from lawsuits while you can."

So what's in store for iTunes? A natural first step is music videos. These are essentially promotional content, short, small in size, and of relatively low value to the labels, but nonetheless a perfect discrete digital "goodie" that consumers are eager to download and view repeatedly.

But going to the next step, feature-length movies, will take new hardware. This does not necessarily mean a video iPod. It will require hardware of some kind, though, to painlessly get these movies onto TV screens.

There are several approaches to solving the digital home theatre problem, which echo the thin client vs. desktop PC argument of a few years ago:

  1. Home Theatre PCs - full, desktop-class computers running personal video recorder and audio/video jukebox software
  2. "Thin clients" - network devices that act as video output peripherals (i.e. Airport Express for Video)
  3. A video iPod (vPod) that downloads video from iTunes and can also output it to a TV as most digital cameras can today

If you're not familiar with Airport Express, it's a convenient, portable $129 WiFi gadget that lets you set up a WiFi access point anywhere and also acts as a remote audio output for iTunes. If you're running iTunes, you can effortlessly pipe your audio output to any Airport Express, and thus out of your stereo system or TV speakers, anywhere in your home.

It's often said that iTunes is essentially a loss leader to promote iPod sales. I've also been told that Steve Jobs doesn't believe in home-theatre PCs. The Airport Express allows the Mac to remain the "digital hub" for your home entertainment. So it would be consistent with this vision (and Mac rumor sites are conjecturing) that Apple will come up with some sort of WiFi video output device (perhaps based on its implementation of MPEG-4/H.264/AVC video) that can connect to the television and serve as a "video out" for iTunes and QuickTime.

It's interesting to note that such a device almost exists already: Apple's $500 Mac Mini has DVI video output, and many people have found that they can hook one up to their HDTV and watch their QuickTime videos on the big screen. I'll be at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in a couple of weeks, and many of us are hoping that Apple announces at least one of the video solutions listed above. Stay tuned.

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P.S. In the meantime, video iTunes has at least solved one problem that has plagued Mac users for a decade. It has a "full screen" feature for movies. That means you no longer have to pay $29 for QuickTime pro in order to play your movies fullscreen.


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By - May 31, 2005 | Permalink | Category: Digital Video
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