January 15, 2008

Macworld Expo.

Apple "We're back with Apple TV Take II." Says Steve Jobs. For the New York Times, Damon Darlin is blogging live from Macworld Expo and notes, "Here's what you can do with Apple TV: rent movies directly on your widescreen TV with Apple TV. Rent them in DVD quality and you can rent them in HD Quality (The crowd starts going crazy, like Barack Obama was in the house.)"

Updated through 1/16.

Then there's the iTunes movie rentals store. "Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lion's Gate and New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers, 20th Century, Paramount, Walt Disney and Sony Pictures." Never mind the overlap: "The crowd goes nuts. 'We're going to have all the first-run films,' Mr Jobs says. And great library titles, he says, including Hunt for Red October (no clapping here; possibly a crowd that prefers light romantic comedies)."

Updates: "What the analysts seemed to miss is that the MacBook Air, a very cool small body laptop, also has a built-in step towards changing the entire technology," notes David Poland. "[T]here is no DVD or CD-Rom drive on the machine. None. Why? Because the hardware is suggesting, quite clearly, how you should interact with the software. Rent or buy movies online... no need for a pesky disc."

The Hollywood Reporter's Andrew Wallenstein comments: "We knew 20th Century Fox was coming down the pike, but there was no indication that everyone else was jumping on the bandwagon, too - there could be no bigger vote of confidence for the new service."

Update, 1/16: "Apple is about to turn the movie rentals business on its ear," writes Eliot Van Buskirk for Wired News. "'They really nailed it,' Jupiter Research Vice President and Research Director Michael Gartenberg said of Apple's move into movie rentals. 'This is going to be extremely disruptive, doing for movies what the iTunes music store did for music.'"

Posted by dwhudson at January 15, 2008 10:20 AM