TNL.net

Apple Storms Hollywood

16th
42

While most of the announce­ments around new iPod devices last week were under­whelm­ing, Apple’s recent changes to iTunes could point to a much wider strat­egy to rev­o­lu­tion­ize how media is con­sumed in the future.

Under­stand­ing iTunes LP and iTunes Extras

For the near future, Apple’s dom­i­nance in the mobile enter­tain­ment mar­ket will remain uncon­tested. Enter­ing its 8th year, the iPod has suc­cess­fully mor­phed from an inter­est­ing new player in a small cat­e­gory into an all-purpose plat­form span­ning the breadth of the audio con­sumer elec­tronic land­scape, por­tions of the mobile phone busi­ness, and while its AppleTV busi­ness is still lag­ging, the intro­duc­tion of iTunes LP can eas­ily be seen as part of a revamp for that platform.

The com­pany talked a fair amount about the abil­ity to add extra con­tent to music tracks, form­ing an expe­ri­ence that is much more akin to that of a music LP. But let’s stop for a sec­ond and think of what a stereo­typ­i­cal Apple cus­tomer might look like? Some­how, the imme­di­ate image that pops in my mind is not some­one who was born prior to the late 70s.

Sure, now that the iPod line has estab­lished itself as the dom­i­nant line in the portable enter­tain­ment con­sumer elec­tron­ics world, one can see a lot of peo­ple over 40 sport­ing the devices but truth be told, most of Apple cus­tomers are prob­a­bly younger and, to them, LPs are either some­thing that belongs in a museum or falls in the cat­e­gory of music snobs. The sit-back expe­ri­ence and add-ons that came with most LPs is not how they have ever expe­ri­enced music and it is highly prob­a­ble that they will not change their behav­ior because Apple believes that retro is cool.

The music expe­ri­ence is more of an ambi­ent one, where the track itself is the thing and where even music videos have mostly fallen by the way­side (YouTube killed the video star?) In today’s short atten­tion span world, extra attach­ments to media exists in two places: on DVD and on Blu­Ray disks, tech­nolo­gies best expe­ri­enced when deal­ing with a TV screen.

In fact, when delv­ing into the details of the iTunes LP spec­i­fi­ca­tion,devel­oper Jay Robin­son dis­cov­ered the following:

The LP frame seems to have a width and height of 1280×720. This is nice, but means I get ugly scroll­bars all over my 13″ Mac­Book screen.

The res­o­lu­tion seemed inter­est­ing as I remem­bered it from some­where but had to think about it for a few min­utes (I’ll get into that in a the next para­graph) but it was fas­ci­nat­ing to me that one would expe­ri­ence ugly scroll­bars on a Mac­Book. Say what you want about Apple prod­ucts, ugly is not some­thing that gen­er­ally comes to mind. In find, the fact that things were ugly on a com­puter mon­i­tor imme­di­ately gives us clues into where Apple may be going next. Since we can safely assume that Apple would not push some­thing ugly out the door, we can also assume that the 1280x720 res­o­lu­tion is no fluke. And since it looks ugly on a Mac­Book, we may think of where else this type of media can be consumed.

720p?

1280 x 720 is the kind of 16:9 ratio that is found in a 720p high def­i­n­i­tion video mode. That mode has become more or less the default low end mode for high def­i­n­i­tion and is how most tele­vi­sion broad­casts in the US and West­ern Europe are han­dled. It is also a for­mat that most plasma or LCD TV can han­dle. But also of note is that it is the high­est res­o­lu­tion for­mat offered in terms of movies and TV shows sold through the iTunes store, and the high­est res­o­lu­tion HD video res­o­lu­tion now sup­ported by AppleTV play­ers.

So we now have a clear sign that the iTunes LP con­tent seems specif­i­cally for­mat­ted to be best expe­ri­enced on a TV screen and it seems that Apple’s rec­om­men­da­tion would be to use an AppleTV to do so.

And then, this week, Apple retired its low-end AppleTV and dropped the price of its mid-range (now entry level) offer­ing by one third. Such a move is not just based on the idea of mov­ing units but appears to rep­re­sent a poten­tial need for disk space and any­one who looked at the size of a DVD or Blu-Ray disk can attest to the fact that such video offer­ings can chew up space rel­a­tively quickly. And extras tend to add a fair amount too, which seems to increase the need for space if you are intent on rent­ing or sell­ing DVD or Blu-Ray like con­tent via the Internet.

Add to this the gen­eral reluc­tance Apple has had to sup­port­ing Blu-Ray in their com­puter hard­ware plat­form (the main advan­tage of Blu-Ray, accord­ing to its advo­cates, is the abil­ity to dis­play video at a higher res­o­lu­tion for­mat than 720p) and it seems Apple is gear­ing up for an assault on that cat­e­gory (espe­cially since the prob­lem of extras is now solved by iTunes Extras).

720p Record­ing

Mean­while, on the Mac, the new oper­at­ing sys­tem came out with a ver­sion of Quick­time that removed abil­ity to sup­port plu­g­ins for exten­si­bil­ity. While Apple is already a strong player in the video edit­ing world, offer­ing both pro­fes­sional (Final Cut Pro) and con­sumer (iMovie) tools, it is also inter­est­ing to note that they are start­ing to intro­duce light edit­ing video capa­bil­i­ties directly into the oper­at­ing system.

We already know that the iPhone 3G S can record video, a key fea­ture of the offer­ing, and we’ve just wit­nessed the intro­duc­tion of video record­ing capa­bil­i­ties within the iPod Nano (and we can assume that it’s only a mat­ter of time before the iPod Touch gets its own video record­ing capa­bil­i­ties) but here’s where it gets inter­est­ing: the iPhone 3G S could the­o­ret­i­cally shoot 720p video as all the hard­ware to do so is there.

The rise of YouTube and the suc­cess of Flip cam­eras have shown Apple that a por­tion of the con­sumer mar­ket is inter­ested in record­ing and view­ing video. While the YouTube offer­ings tend to be gen­er­ally of a lower video qual­ity, the intro­duc­tion of 720p as a default record­ing chipset in Apple’s offer­ings appears con­sis­tent with the company’s attempt to cater to a higher end what­ever mar­ket it enters.

So it would seem to be a nor­mal pro­gres­sion for Apple to even­tu­ally move its prod­uct lines to pro­duc­ing 720p con­tent that can then be redistributed.

Today, that export­ing can hap­pen via syn­chro­niz­ing one’s iPhone’s GS or export­ing con­tent to iTunes, YouTube, or MobileMe from Quick­time X. MobileMe and YouTube appeared to make sense but why export to iTunes?

A user gen­er­ated marketplace

The suc­cess of the iPhone as a devel­op­ment plat­form has sur­prised many, myself included. In the short span of a few years, Apple has cre­ated a mar­ket­place that is rumored to be sell­ing US$200 mil­lion a month’s worth of appli­ca­tion soft­ware in incre­ments of about a dol­lar. If you’re mak­ing 30 per­cent of that rev­enue by host­ing the apps and han­dling the dis­tri­b­u­tion, you might notice.

I would ven­ture that there are now a num­ber of dis­cus­sions around Apple as to how to repro­duce this phe­nom­e­non across other cat­e­gories. With the rise of YouTube, Last.fm, MySpace, and other, Apple is now also wit­ness­ing the rise of the inde­pen­dent and while the com­pany has had some suc­cess in bring­ing video con­tent to the iTunes store, it has not been able to get the rich mar­gins it is get­ting from the music indus­try (some­thing the music indus­try now appears to regret) and from iPhone devel­op­ers (who, for the most part, are not large com­pa­nies) from TV and movie producers.

True, the com­pany now offers rentals and sales of video con­tent but what if it could open up a mar­ket­place where every inde­pen­dent con­tent cre­ator could dis­trib­ute con­tent? What if inde­pen­dent movie-makers or musi­cians could sell directly through the iTunes store and pro­vide con­tent on all the apple plat­forms (TV, iPod, phone, com­puter) with a sin­gle click. I sus­pect that many would be will­ing to give up 30 per­cent of their rev­enue in order to get to that public.

The com­po­nents all seem to be there and it seems to me that it won’t be long before Apple starts push­ing the idea that we are all con­tent pro­duc­ers (an old idea at Apple, which was at the source of their cre­at­ing the iLife suite) and we can all make some money at pro­duc­ing that con­tent. Hav­ing done so, Apple would not only have con­trol of the music indus­try but could also assert itself in the TV and movie space.

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42 Comments

  1. 1ITunes LP hints at Apple TV plans « Videotcy — September 17, 2009 at 10:12 am

    […] believes Apple may be seri­ously flirt­ing with video even with­out any new Apple TV mod­els read, Apple Storms Hol­ly­wood Share and […]

  2. 2Yacko — September 17, 2009 at 10:14 am

    Yep no doubt 720p. It’s high def with the least band­width. Even with big con­sumer pipes, 1080p would be a pain. It’s good enough. Only the biggest mon­i­tors have 1920x1080 res­o­lu­tion. Lesser lap­top and mon­i­tor screens gen­er­ally exceed 720p. One more rea­son for 16:9 720p that is not men­tioned — I’ll bet the com­ing Apple tablet has exactly that res­o­lu­tion or better.

  3. 3Tristan Louis — September 17, 2009 at 10:21 am

    Yacko,

    The band­with issues makes total sense. As far as the tablet, it would also make sense though I sus­pect that tablet-like tech­nol­ogy will make its way into the mac­book and iMac series soon too…

  4. 4Patrick — September 17, 2009 at 3:54 pm

    “Enter­ing it’s 8th year” should be:
    “Enter­ing its 8th year”.

  5. 5Tristan Louis — September 17, 2009 at 4:51 pm

    Patrick,

    Thanks for not­ing this. I’ve cor­rected it now.

  6. 6mxt — September 17, 2009 at 4:59 pm

    RE: “it is also inter­est­ing to note that they are start­ing to intro­duce light edit­ing video capa­bil­i­ties directly into the oper­at­ing system.”

    An OS is the inter­face between the phys­i­cal hard­ware (dri­vers) and appli­ca­tion soft­ware. The app soft­ware may be user fac­ing or just com­po­nent to component.

    Apple is NOT intro­duc­ing “light edit­ing video capa­bil­i­ties directly into the oper­at­ing sys­tem”! They are bundling some video edit­ing soft­ware with the sale of their machines that include an OS and a bunch of other use­ful soft­ware that their cus­tomers will enjoy.

    mxt

    THINK
    think dif­fer­ent
    Think Open Source

  7. 7Tristan Louis — September 17, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    Mxt,

    I’d beg to dif­fer. Since Quick­time X is an inte­gral part of the OS and the quick­time toolkit is part of the OS itself, it appears to me that it’s not going too far to assume that they could poten­tially offer access to the edit­ing tools via API. As such, I would con­tinue argu­ing that it is indeed part of the OS.

  8. 8James Katt — September 17, 2009 at 9:55 pm

    I would rec­om­mend Apple do the following:

    1. Apple TV: small form fac­tor, 2 GB capac­ity, Mac OS. This is a mild update of the cur­rent Apple TV.

    2. Apple TV Pro: sim­i­lar width to a Stereo Receiver, but much thin­ner in height. Mul­ti­ple Hard drive for up to 8 GB + of stor­age capac­ity. Mul­ti­ple out­puts to allow con­nec­tion to exist­ing stereo ampli­fiers and TVs.

    Both can do down­loaded Apps (e.g. games), movies, music and music albums from the iTunes Music Store. Both can have con­trollers for down­loaded games — i.e. go after XBox and Playsta­tion but for casual games — the huge num­bers that are being sold in the App store today. One can also browse the inter­net (e.g. dur­ing par­ties, etc.). Con­trollers use blue­tooth and have accelerom­e­ters. Key­boards may be connected.

    One can have their entire music col­lec­tion and video col­lec­tion obtained from the iTunes Music Store or other sources such as Amazon.

    The inter­face is NOT Mac OS X, but an adap­ta­tion for the fam­ily room — a sim­pler, touch-like user inter­face — since it will be used pri­mar­ily for entertainment.

    This would be Utopia for the liv­ing room.

    It would also spell deep com­pe­ti­tion for receivers and audio stereos. One can con­nect them directly to pow­ered speak­ers, for exam­ple to bypass hav­ing the need for other audio gear.

    It can also con­nect via iTunes to inter­net stream­ing video and audio sites! Think about all the radio sta­tions that broad­cast on the internet.

    It can also con­nect to var­i­ous inter­net con­tent sites such as NBA.com for broad­casts of mul­ti­ple bas­ket­ball games at the same time. The NBA can even write an App for it to be down­loaded from the iTunes App store.

    Imag­ine THAT! WOW! I want one — espe­cially the Pro model.

    This would be the ulti­mate fam­ily room enter­tain­ment device that would also appeal to every audio­phile and videophile.

    Who needs DVDs and Blue Ray disk?

    It can grow in the future — as pipes get wider and stor­age gets larger — to encom­pass full HD video as well. This would insure that Apple has a mar­ket for upgrad­ing hard­ware (where Apple makes its profits).

    Tah Dah!

    Do you hear me, Steve? He already prob­a­bly thought about it.

    Inde­pen­dent pro­duc­ers would have a field day! They can cre­ate con­tent and sell it directly to con­sumers on the iTunes store. Apple would become the cen­ter of the enter­tain­ment world.

  9. 9Tristan Louis — September 17, 2009 at 9:59 pm

    James,

    I assume you mean TER­Abytes, not Giga­Bytes :)

    I doubt they would add any store beyond iTunes (def­i­nitely no Ama­zon con­nec­tion there) and I sus­pect that a small remote or way to con­nect to it via the iPhone would make sense.

    And I fully agree with you that there will prob­a­bly not be a DVD or Blu­Ray drive in that…

  10. 10Marco — September 18, 2009 at 3:02 am

    User gen­er­ated mar­ket­place, wasn’t that sup­posed to make Youtube rich? Turned out nobody wanted to pay to see any­thing that wasn’t a movie or TV show. Hulu’s mak­ing a drib­ble of cash but it’s a few per­cent of what the same con­tent fetches on cable/satellite deliv­ery. Sure, download/stream on demand is the future, and there’ll be some tug of war between the purchase-to-own and rent models.

    Will Apple open up an advertising-based rev­enue model in iTunes/iPod/AppleTV? Run ad inser­tions against user-generated con­tent? Seems unlikely.

  11. 11Frank — September 19, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    Really all Apple needs to do is add a “Pub­lish to iTunes” com­mand to the File menu in Final Cut, Logic, Garage Band, and iMovie.

    One move and they would cut the legs out from the con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion industry.

  12. 12orta — September 19, 2009 at 12:55 pm

    When I was mak­ing an iTunes LP for my band ( its free for down­load at http://brutaltechnopunk.com ) last week­end I spot­ted quite a few hooks into iTunes that most likely would be trans­ferrable into Apple TV.

    Its still not some­thing that a lay­man could cre­ate, but per­haps with Dash­code these could be cre­ated by anyone.

  13. 13George Howard — September 19, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    con­tent providers can already access the iTunes mar­ket­place by using a ser­vice like TuneCore (et al.) to get their music on the store.

    Apple *could* make the process more direct, but I’m not sure that it’s in their inter­est to do so. Com­pa­nies like TuneCore essen­tially take on the bur­den of mak­ing sure that the con­tent is sub­mit­ted to the iTunes store in the proper for­mat, etc. Addi­tion­ally, the rights issues sur­round­ing music are equally, if not far more com­plex, than those around apps. The con­stant gripe about the app store is the approval process. I can’t even imag­ine how long it would take for apple to approve a song/record via their sub­mis­sion process given that — due to the far lower bar­ri­ers of entry for mak­ing music as com­pared to mak­ing apps — would mean an expo­nen­tially larger num­ber of songs/albums being sub­mit­ted for approval than there cur­rently are apps.

    None of this is to imply that it can’t be done, only that it may not be in apple’s inter­ests to do so.

    [dis­clo­sure: while I no longer work with them on a day-to-day basis, I was one of the orig­i­nal TuneCore founders, and still have an inter­est in the company.]

  14. 14Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 1:33 pm

    Marco,

    I think the approach Apple would take to UGC is dif­fer­ent from YouTube’s in that it would prob­a­bly go after mon­e­ti­za­tion sce­nar­ios instead of offer­ing free con­tent wrapped in adver­tis­ing. Remem­ber that Apple has no com­pe­tency in the ad space but Google does…

  15. 15Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 1:34 pm

    Frank,

    Pub­lish­ing to iTunes does not mean pub­lish­ing to the store but I agree with you that such a 1-click approach could be revolutionary.

  16. 16Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 1:34 pm

    Orta,

    Do you have more details relat­ing to those hooks? Care to elaborate?

    TNL

  17. 17Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    George,

    I was not aware of TuneCore so thanks for chim­ing in and telling us about it. Hav­ing taken a cur­sory look at it, I sus­pect that the company’s model is not too far from where Apple might go (though I sus­pect that Apple would embed their offer­ing deeply into iTunes and their edit­ing tools)…

    As far as the approval process, it’s true that there would be issues but I sus­pect that they would define some­thing akin to the app approval process. It might ran­kle a lot of peo­ple but ulti­mately could mean sub­stan­tial rev­enue for Apple, which is the thing they would be most inter­ested in if they take this approach.

  18. 18Michael — September 19, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    The Apple tablet will be the replace­ment for the Apple TV. When you’re at home, it will “live” with your TV setup (not in the home office), but when you take it with you, you’ll still have your video con­tent with you on a device that will make for very high qual­ity view­ing & lis­ten­ing. It will work in con­junc­tion with an Air­port Express kind of thing that will allow you to hang addi­tional HDs off it for addi­tional storage.

  19. 19Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 2:05 pm

    Michael,

    An intrigu­ing con­cept. So you assume that they’d get rid of the box com­pletely and use some kind of Air­port Express like device to con­nect to the screen. That would make sense, with the table being a touch-like full screen experience…

  20. 20James Gowan — September 19, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    All I’m want­ing is an Apple TV with a DVD player or a pro model with a Blu-ray player. I’ve got two 50″ Vizio Plas­mas and only one of them has a Mac Mini — I don’t really want to have to buy another Mini for the other one. I’d rather have a less expen­sive Apple TV that at least could play a disk. Is that ask­ing too much?!

  21. 21James Gowan — September 19, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    Sorry… I got off point in the post above –

    About Apple’s iTunes LPs (iTLP) … I think they are a great idea and think that adding in greater value will really help jus­tify the higher price points they’re ask­ing for (I believe Dave Matthew’s iTLP is about $20). But worth it! It has lots of songs, videos, pic­tures, facts, art­work, lyrics! I think Apple is going to do very well with these. I will cer­tainly be buy­ing them.

  22. 22Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 2:50 pm

    James,

    First, I think that you won’t see Blu­Ray in any Apple devices for the fore­see­able future. It appears that intro­duc­ing Blu­Ray in their prod­uct line would only dimin­ish rev­enue for the iTunes store movie and TV down­loads and could lower Apple’s chances at get­ting good deals in that arena (on the broader end, Blu­Ray does not seem to get trac­tion (and I say that as some­one who owns a Blu­Ray drive).

    iTunes LP may be adding value to music but, as I said in the entry, because music is not expe­ri­enced in the same way as movies, I sus­pects that iTunes extra is really more impor­tant and iTunes LP is just Apple’s way to obfus­cate what they’re try­ing to do.

  23. 23Apple Storms Hollywood | TightWind — September 19, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    […] Tris­tan Louis won­ders whether Apple will do to film what they did to appli­ca­tions: True, the com­pany now offers rentals and sales of video con­tent but what if it could open up a mar­ket­place where every inde­pen­dent con­tent cre­ator could dis­trib­ute con­tent? What if inde­pen­dent movie-makers or musi­cians could sell directly through the iTunes store and pro­vide con­tent on all the apple plat­forms (TV, iPod, phone, com­puter) with a sin­gle click. […]

  24. 24Jay Robinson — September 19, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    Since I first dis­sected the iTunes LP, http://jwr.cc/x/3, I have fig­ured out a lot more about the for­mat. It is most def­i­nitely des­tined for AppleTV; there are men­tions of it through­out the code. One of the first tags inside the index.html says ‘meta name=“hdtv-fullscreen“‘. I can­not wait to see my iTunes LP and iTunes Extras on my AppleTV.

    The other inter­est­ing ques­tion is since Apple will pro­vide an HTML engine in the AppleTV, will they let us browse the Internet?

  25. 25Pierre Lebeaupin — September 19, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    You know, I have been think­ing about this for a slightly dif­fer­ent case: when Apple intro­duced HTTP stream­ing (first in iPho­neOS 3.0, then Snow Leop­ard). Why did they intro­duce this tech­nol­ogy instead of using exist­ing stream­ing tech­nolo­gies like RTSP that they had always sup­ported so far (with e.g. QT Stream­ing Server)? Sure, there’s the fact HTTP Stream­ing does not need spe­cial fire­wall sup­port, but in my opin­ion it’s a side bonus, not the whole story. The whole story, in my opin­ion, is that it makes much eas­ier to set up a live con­tent “stream­ing” server. It’s sim­ple: no one can rea­son­ably set up a RTSP server on its home con­nec­tion (usu­ally hor­ri­ble upload band­width and ISP terms that pre­vent it any­way), and installing one on a remote host requires spe­cial host­ing that allows you to install any soft­ware on the server, which is an expen­sive propo­si­tion; and at any rate this is a tech­ni­cally com­pli­cated endeavor; so it’s both tech­ni­cally and finan­cially chal­leng­ing for indi­vid­u­als or small enti­ties. So the RTSP servers that exist tend to be con­trolled by big con­tent providers who are stringy with they RTPS “channels”.

    Any par­al­lels? See where I’m going?

    With HTTP stream­ing, while you do have some non-trivial setup on the record­ing side (cam­era + encoder + stream seg­menter soft­ware), the com­plex­ity is entirely on the local side and from there the result “just” needs to be sent as it is recorded to reg­u­lar HTTP host­ing (which of course you’ve made sure has suf­fi­cient band­width to serve the con­nec­tions you’ll get). While one could make a per­ma­nent TV chan­nel with this tech, this strikes me as so last cen­tury, instead I think it will be more for event-like things, for instance an indie band could record and broad­cast its con­certs– live. I think it has the poten­tial to gen­er­ate a rev­o­lu­tion sim­i­lar to the “radio libres” (a move­ment in France in the 70s-80s sim­i­lar to that of LPFM broad­cast­ing in the US).

  26. 26Ryan Gray — September 19, 2009 at 4:48 pm

    Uh, the 13″ Mac­book is already 1280x800, so full screen 720p is not a prob­lem. 720p con­tent in another win­dow is where the scroll­bars come in. Does iTunes LP have a full screen mode?

  27. 27donnacha | WordSkill — September 19, 2009 at 6:42 pm

    I agree with Michael that the new AppleTV will be the tablet — when they intro­duce it in Feb­ru­ary, it will be con­sid­er­ably more expen­sive than com­pet­ing net­books, so, Apple will be work­ing hard to counter the inevitable meme that you are pay­ing hun­dreds of dol­lars extra merely for the Apple brand. To do this, they need to entirely merge the AppleTV line into the tablet, to give at least one clear exam­ple of a known value above and beyond what the net­books can offer, notion­ally jus­ti­fy­ing $229 of the extra cost.

    Michael sug­ges­tion of an Air­port like device that you stick into the back of your TV is also bang on, although this will, of course, cost an extra $50.

  28. 28A.T. — September 19, 2009 at 7:19 pm

    Sorry to say this, but appar­ently you have no idea what is going on regard­ing iTunes or online pub­lish­ing in gen­eral. Almost every sin­gle artist on Youtube, with even a small fol­low­ing is already pub­lish­ing to most of the avail­able online stores (not only iTunes) through ser­vices like http://www.tunecore.com/

    And guess what, they don’t pay 30% com­mis­sion, but $0.99/track

    And iPhoto, iMovie or iWeb are great tools to cre­ate con­tent you want to share with your fam­ily and frieds, but not for things you want to sell, that should be pretty obvi­ous, there is no indi­ca­tion what so ever, that Apple intended otherwise.

    I have no Idea where you are going with that idea that video edit­ing is build into the OS. Even if it was, you can only clip the begin­ning or the end­ing, how use­ful is that for con­tent pro­duc­ers who want to be payed for that content.

    What­ever, you build your ideas on wrong assump­tions and make up things as you go. Alas, kudos for get­ting fea­tured on DF for this BS.

  29. 29Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 9:38 pm

    A.T.,

    Thanks for the comment,

    True, tools like Tunecore are indeed part of the equa­tion in today’s world but what would hap­pen if Apple decided to dis­able access to the iTunes store from it? What if iTunes Con­nect were the only way to get onto iTunes? Would artists then aban­don Apple?

    iPhoto and iMovie are indeed con­sumer tools but I’m sure that they could be an entry. There’s a lot of con­sumer gen­er­ated con­tent out there that, for one rea­son or another, does not nec­es­sar­ily need high pro­duc­tion value. So your assump­tion is based on the con­cept that Apple would need to make many changes to “pro­fes­sion­al­ize” those tools, which I sus­pect is a flawed assumption.

    As far as video edit­ing built into the OS, if the core sep­a­ra­tion of tracks, frames, etc… could be eas­ily access through some of the QT API, some new tools could emerge. Not sure of what but my gut tells me that direc­tion­ally, it might work. And direct pub­lish­ing from the OS might allow some­one to use any pro­fes­sional tool and pub­lish to store with a sin­gle click.

    You have the right to feel my assump­tions are incor­rect and you are right that I’m pro­ject­ing based on those assump­tion but that’s what prog­nos­ti­ca­tion or fore­cast­ing is about.

  30. 30Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 9:39 pm

    I think it does but I need to dou­ble check.

  31. 31Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 9:41 pm

    Jay,

    Thanks for shar­ing what you found.

    I sus­pect we may see an AppleTV ver­sion of Safari, but prob­a­bly with­out Adobe Flash (in a fash­ion sim­i­lar to the one on the iPhone)

  32. 32Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 9:44 pm

    Pierre,

    Bril­liant line of thought. I hadn’t con­sid­ered the http stream­ing but your analy­sis makes total sense and seems to tie into the idea of broad­cast­ing from the iPhone. One could eas­ily charg­ing for some “live report from the scene” for example.…

  33. 33Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 9:46 pm

    Ryan,

    Thanks for men­tion­ing that. You know, I had totally missed that. I just checked the res­o­lu­tion on my mac­book and you’re right. I think iTunes LP can go full screen ( wasn’t that part of the demo dur­ing its intro­duc­tion?) but will have to dou­ble check.

  34. 34Jay Robinson — September 19, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    Neg­a­tive, the iTunes LP can­not go full-screen… yet.

  35. 35Hamranhansenhansen — September 19, 2009 at 11:42 pm

    Apple had been around since 1977 and inspires great prod­uct loy­alty. There are many 40 Mac users. The idea that Apple is a turn of the cen­tury phe­nom­e­non is com­pletely wrong. Dur­ing the 80’s the Mac was the only inter­est­ing com­puter and def­i­nitely the only cre­ative one. Dur­ing the 90’s it was still the only sen­si­ble choice. Most of the music from the late 80’s and the 90’s was made on a Mac in some way. The Web was invented in 1990 on a NeXT cube by a guy who is well over 40 now.

    Young whip­per­snap­pers, etc.

  36. 36Tristan Louis — September 19, 2009 at 11:59 pm

    Ham­ran­hansen­hansen,

    As the for­mer owner of a Sin­clair zx81, I would beg to dif­fer on the idea that the Mac was the only inter­est­ing com­puter in the 80s. I also believe that the Amstrad line in Europe and the Com­modore 64 were inter­est­ing machines :)

    As far as music, you’re inher­ently wrong. Most of the music from the late 80s didn’t involve the mac.

    And Tim Berners-Lee did indeed invent the web a while back but I think it was around 1991, if mem­ory serves me right (I admin­is­tered sunsite.unc.edu, which we launched in 1993 and was one of the first 25 sites on the web)

    How­ever, while what you point out is inter­est­ing, what does it have to do with the dis­cus­sion at hand?

  37. 37Nathan — September 20, 2009 at 5:06 am

    Tris­tan,

    I think Ham­ran­hansen­hansen was tak­ing excep­tion to your state­ment that the “stereo­typ­i­cal Apple cus­tomer” was under 40.

    The real­ity, I believe, is that the bulk of music con­sump­tion is by teens to 20-somethings (that period when they have a lot of time & energy, some spend­ing money, and not yet sad­dled with career and fam­ily). This is not spe­cific to Apple or the iTunes store. As an older music appre­ci­ater myself, I also believe that the over-40 crowd is a fairly wide tail, but it doesn’t wag the dog.

    Thanks for the insight­ful & thought-provoking analy­sis. It should be fun to see where this all goes. I’d like my appletv to be more useful.

    Cheers,
    Nathan.

  38. 38Tristan Louis — September 20, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    Nathan,

    I’m not yet over-40 (get­ting pretty darned close though) but the real­ity is that most of the new tech­nolo­gies are aimed at the sub-30s crowd, whether it is in music or in the rest of the con­sumer elec­tronic space. We can wish it oth­er­wise and it’s true that there are MANY cus­tomers over 30 but it appears that the pri­mary con­cern of elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ers are to ensure sup­port in this sub-30s crowd.

    Decry­ing that real­ity does not make it go away, as you rightly point out :)

  39. 39Kurt Trew — September 21, 2009 at 3:32 pm

    I think that Apple is in a prime posi­tion to be able to offer con­sumers a gate­way to a mul­ti­tude of media because of its expe­ri­ence in dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing. I also think that early next year Apple will be forced to recon­sider the name, iTunes. It’s still half rel­e­vant, but with the intro­duc­tion of in recent years of films/movies, spo­ken word, e-comic dis­tri­b­u­tion (via the iTunes LP, pod­cast etc., the ‘Tunes’ part of the name will have to change to truly reflect the broad offer­ings that the com­pany will be able to offer. I wrote about this in my graphic design blog.

    I also think that the Apple TV and the Mac Mini would form the per­fect merger. A ‘casual’ com­puter that could offer basic func­tion­al­ity as a home com­puter, but would excel at func­tions with regards to enter­tain­ment would give Apple a real way in to the Media Cen­tre market.

  40. 40Tristan Louis — September 21, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    Kurt,

    I sus­pect that iTunes will remain the name going for­ward, much as we have stores like “Tower Records” still in exis­tence. And I, like you, sus­pect that the future for the mac mini is as a media cen­ter type of PC, some­thing I ini­tially talked about almost 5 years ago. Since then, though, I’ve come to think that Steve Jobs does not want to mix the enter­tain­ment expe­ri­ence with the com­put­ing one so the mini is a bit of an odd bird these days…

  41. 41The Books That Would Make Great E-Books « Snarkmarket — September 22, 2009 at 9:43 pm

    […] how it looks, then digs into the guts of the files to find WebKit, CSS, etc., while Tris­tan Lewis won­ders about the pos­si­bil­ity that the for­mat could cre­ate some­thing like an App­Store for content […]

  42. 42Apple: Of Tablets and TVs « The TNL.net weblog — April 25, 2010 at 9:11 pm

    […] it seems odd that it would be work­ing so hard to attempt to cater to the video-specific crowd: iTunes Extra, the rumored deal­ings with Dis­ney and CBS, the increased part­ner­ships to release movies on iTunes […]

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