Many people had expected great announcements from Apple's "It's Showtime" event yesterday, but what Steve Jobs finally presented was underwhelming: Some nice incremental improvements on the current iPod models, a pre-announcement of a PC-to-TV box, and movie downloads.
The last part was the most disappointing. Apple will offer only Disney movies (for obvious reasons) for download on iTunes at a price point of $9.99 to $12.99 apiece. They will come in not-quite-DVD resolution and be available on the first day when they're also available on DVD. Isn't that great? Now you can download "Pirates of the Carribean" for the same price as the DVD in slightly inferior quality and can't even watch it on your TV without problems. What was the value proposition again?
This is frankly even worse that Amazon's Unbox offering that was announced only a few days ago. Somehow the movie studios seem to be paralyzed by wanting to avoid the same mistakes that the music industry made. But the result certainly won't appeal to consumers.
Others try alternative models: Sprint recently made an interesting announcement. They will offer full-length movies on their multimedia phones for between $3.99 and $5.99. Judging from the initial title lists that contains such masterworks as "American Pie" or "The Nutty Professor", Sprint wants to market this service mainly to families that need something to keep the kids busy in the backseat.
That's an interesting marketing idea, but I'm not so sure how successful this will be when junior's streaming video connection keeps breaking down all the time. Unless network coverage improves dramatically, a portable DVD player still might be the better choice for the family car.
At least there's currently a lot of activity in the online movie market, so there's still some hope that over time a decent business model will evolve. But apparently it won't come from Apple this time.
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