Digital Home Thoughts: Cringely: Apple Shouldn't Tread on Wal-Mart

"Whatever happened to the Year of HD that Apple declared at MacWorld in January 2005? In reviewing this week's webcast, I don't recall once hearing the terms "HDTV" or "High Definition." What changed? Apple deliberately repositioned its movie offerings to be better than broadcast quality but less than DVD quality and quite a bit less than HD-quality. Doing so saves on bandwidth, but it is also politically expedient when thinking about Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target -- the three largest sellers of DVDs and, not at all coincidentally, the three largest sellers of iPods, too. By increasing its video resolution only to a point, Apple can tell these retailers that it isn't going to hurt their sales very much. And with the eventual migration to Blu-ray and HD-DVD, there will be an even clearer differentiation between the iTunes product and Blockbuster or Wal-Mart. But Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both deploying slowly and there's a risk that they'll destroy each other with market confusion, so then what? Then the iPod, that's what. Apple can present to its studio buddies the idea that iPods are perfectly good movie containers. Remember the same H.264 movie plays on your iPod or your TV, meaning the iPod carries the same code, making it a viable HD-DVD or Blu-Ray equivalent. Why else would you need an 80-gig iPod?"

An interesting theory to say the least. 8O He has an excellent point about Apple not wanting to tick off their largest iPod retailers (or the DVD studios for that matter). However, at the moment it remains a theory and only time will tell us whether it pans out. Give the article a read and let us know what you think. Is Jobs positioning the iPod to be the end-all content carrier? It's well on its way already, I think...