Apple announcements
As noted in a previous post, Apple sorta recently announced new services and products. More relevant to the recent posts here, they announced a new movie store and something codenamed “iTV”. The iTunes movie store is pretty much what I expected. They provide a good experience consistent with the music store, but they only have 75 titles. While they are some quality titles, Amazon Unbox has about 1500. That’s a couple of orders of magnitude more. What’s also impressive about Amazon Unbox is that we’ve pretty much caught up on TV content in only a few months. Of course Amazon does not have Lost or Desperate Housewives since their with ABC which is related to Disney which is related to Apple. In any case that’s still impressive since Apple has been around much longer and Unbox just debuted.
What Apple and Amazon are both missing is an experience better than DVD. Of course there’s price, but as I said before, that won’t matter in the long run since they’ll steady state and hit a price point that’s compelling to users. The winner of this downloadable movie market is the one who can bring the best experience to the entertainment center. Is Apple’s iTV the answer? Apple fanboys will disagree with me, but I don’t think so. It only works with iTunes so it’s too specialized and expensive ($299). Does Amazon have the right answer or even an answer? Who knows? I guess I would know since I work there, but I wouldn’t tell if I knew or didn’t know.
Apple’s announcement went as expected…not that impressive. Naturally, they get tons of press and sometimes unjustified praise. Their store experience is very good, but their content selection is not. It kinda reminds me of Sony PSP UMD’s. The selection is not good because all titles are mostly from Sony. Unbox is far from perfect as well, but it’s still very early in the game. Amazon and Apple just entered the arena, but are very far from the ring.
