At long last, Apple made The Big Announcement today: they’re taking over the world of video.
For starters, iTunes now has a TV Shows section, with commercial-free episodes of shows for sale for $2 apiece. (“Desperate Housewives,” for example.) Now, there are very few shows for which I’d pay $2. For me, the price point is $5/month for The Daily Show. But I understand that there is systemic work to make this happen — the TV industry isn’t like the music industry, and they’re not accustomed to selling individual episodes.
Then there’s the video iPod, to nobody’s surprise. Right now they’re pushing using it to watch music videos, which they’ve offered for a while now. You won’t often catch me watching video on an iPod, but, happily, it has an S-video output, so it’s really just a bad-ass new expansion of the iPod capabilities.
And we have the new iMac. It’s physically the same as the old models, but it comes with an iPod-styled Bluetooth remote control and what’s essentially TV software, named Front Row. It presents a TiVo-style interface where users can select songs/movies from iTunes, photos from iPhoto, home movies from iMovie, or play DVDs. They have a great demo of the software available.
Front Row particularly appeals to me. I have a 20″ wide-aspect LCD screen that makes a fine substitute for a TV — it’s roughly equivalent in size to a 23″ CRT, only it shows letterboxed movies without those pesky black bars.
It seems clear what Apple is going to do from here. They’ll expand their offerings while pushing the sales of the iPod as the means of transferring the video from the computer to the TV. If they’re able to make a play for either the TV or replacing the TV with an iMac variant, they’ll do it. If they’re not — and nobody else has been able to manage it so far — then they can keep going with the iPod approach to video. They can easily eliminate video rentals and NetFlix, and they may well eliminate cable television for households like mine, if they can sort out a more reasonable rate than $2/show.
I, for one, welcome our new Apple overlords. Now I’ve gotta get me one of these iPods…