Although Apple’s new MacBook Air is certainly a headline stealer, I think the biggest announcements to come out of this year’s Macworld are those relating to the Apple TV “Take 2″ and iTunes Movie Rentals.
The Apple TV concept has not caught on since going on sale in March 2007, as Steve Jobs admitted during his keynote. Originally designed as a computer accessory to allow you to view music and video from your computer on your TV, it worked more or less like an iPod by syncing content via iTunes. Crucially, however, it wasn’t possible to acquire new content via the Apple TV device itself. So, if you decided you wanted to download a new TV programme or film, it was necessary first to go to your computer and download it, and then sync the Apple TV with the computer. At least one step too many.
The other problem with the Apple TV was the restricted content available to it. Although Apple had done quite a good job, in the US at least, of making TV programmes available to buy and download, even in the US the range of films was fairly meagre. Furthermore, it was only possible to purchase films, not to rent them.
Now all of these issues appear to have been overcome.
The new version of Apple TV announced at this year’s Macworld, in effect a major software upgrade to the existing hardware, is designed to work completely independently of your computer – indeed, although you can still sync music and video with a Mac or PC, you don’t actually need to own one at all to use the new Apple TV. Instead you just plug the Apple TV in to your television and your broadband connection. Once plugged in, it’s possible to browse the full list of TV programmes and movies available in the iTunes store, download podcasts, stream photos from .Mac and Flickr, and browse YouTube, and all from the comfort of your sitting room.
To accompany this change to the Apple TV, Apple have also announced a new system of iTunes Movie Rentals. So for the first time it will be possible to just rent a film from the iTunes store. Furthermore, as Apple have struck deals with all the major film studios to support this service, it looks like there will be a very good selection to choose from, including all the latest films and High Definition (HD) versions of many of them. So, you will be able to sit down of an evening, browse a list of all the latest films, select the one you want, and start watching it almost straight away for a relatively modest fee of between $2.99 and $4.99. I think this alone is enough to make the Apple TV a real hit.
I have seen some suggestions that the cost of rentals is too high for this system to be successful, particularly in comparison to something like a subscription to Netflix, which offers a flat rate rental by mail service to customers in the US. However, I think Apple’s bet that subscriptions aren’t what most people want in the music download business, also holds in the film rental business. In both cases, people don’t generally like ongoing costs, and especially when they can’t be sure that their usage is likely to merit paying out a set amount every month. If you can be sure that you will be renting and watching a certain number of DVDs per month, and are prepared to wait for them to arrive in the post, then a subscription service like Netflix makes sense. However, if like me, you’ll be lucky to find time to watch one DVD a month, it makes a lot more sense to have a service that allows you to sit down and select what you want when you do have a bit of time, pay a set amount, and start watching almost straight away.
Personally, I can’t wait for this service to come to the UK. Certainly the Apple TV is likely to become a lot more popular over here when it does. If the BBC can also manage to get their iPlayer service working on it as well, as Ashley Highfield suggested in a recent blog entry, then I think it will become very popular indeed.
