Digital Home Thoughts: Cringely on Apple, Blu-ray, and 1080p Downloads

"Before we attempt to calculate what's at risk here for Apple, let's think about what the company has to gain -- or what they might THINK they have to gain – by delaying. Apple clearly sees a huge part of its future in content distribution including TV shows and movies. I can only guess that Jobs sees Blu-ray as a threat to that download business and this decision to delay Blu-ray deployment is an expensive stalling action, buying time for Apple to launch its own true HD alternative. Yes, you can download some movies from iTunes in 720p right now, but in the surging HD market 720p is no longer good enough. The obvious standard is 1080p and right now you need Blu-ray or BitTorrent to get that. Putting on my near-futurist hat, then, I'm guessing Apple is working madly to deploy its own 1080p download solution and is hoping the world will wait for it."

An insightful article by Robert X. Cringely about why Apple, a core supporter in the Blu-ray camp since 2005, hasn't equipped a single Mac with a Blu-ray drive. It makes a twisted kind of Jobsian sense when you ponder all the variables. Apple's new Apple TV is a big leap up from the first version, and the infrastructure is in place for Apple to do some impressive things in the downloadable HD video arena...but not without help moving those gigantic files around. Some big things are happening here.

Meanwhile, I'm still sitting here staring at my Xbox Live Marketplace TV shows section and wondering why there are only three items of content and one of them is a UFC event from two years ago. Sure, Microsoft has added some new HD movies, but overall I still perceive the effort as being rather feeble. Microsoft has the infrastructure in place (Vista + Xbox + Zune + Windows Mobile) to do some amazing things, yet year after year they only manage to inch forward. What gives?