In a bizarre little piece being sagely nodded over by delusional pro-Apple beardos around the web, Danny Gorog claims that Blu-Ray is never going to come to the Macs because Apple’s afraid to let Blu-Ray compete with its iTunes HD video streaming.
Fast forward to now, when the iTunes store is the largest retailer of music in the world and when Apple announces that customers are now renting over 50,000 movies and TV shows per day, and you’ll get a sense of why Apple is stalling on Blu-ray.
There’s likely to be one winner in the HD space, and the less legitimacy Apple (who is the leader in the video production space via its Final Cut franchise) gives to Blu-ray, the less likely the format is to succeed.
This is just a stupid argument. First of all, Apple’s “HD” streaming is nothing of the sort: it’s DVD quality at best. But that’s tangential. Blu-Ray has yet to come to Macs because there haven’t been a major product revision of the Mac line since Blu-Ray won the format war. I wouldn’t be surprised if the refreshed MacBook Pros expected to be announced next week have a Blu-Ray option on the high-end.
The idea that Apple considers traditional media, high def or not, a competitor to its digital delivery cloud is silly. Being able to rip your own CDs to iTunes has not hurt Apple, nor has Quicktime Pro’s ability to allow users to convert video files to MP4 format. Apple knows it has nothing to worry about from physical media: ease of use, one click shopping and nearly instantaneous delivery will always make Apple gobs of money. Apple’s worry is a serious iTunes competitor, not a slab of plastic you have to buy… *larf*… in a store.
I’m surprised that BoingBoing forgot this, but one of the reasons why there’s no blu-ray on Macs is because of the end-to-end DRM that’s required by AACS. That means that Apple would have to booger up OS X with worthless DRM from the optical drive all the way to the display and audio jack (plus the external monitor ports).
That DRM is one of the reasons why Vista is such a resource hog, because it always on. Considering that Apple’s trying to reduce OS X’s footprint with 10.6, I seriously doubt that they’re going to to that. Maybe a new Apple TV with a Blu-ray, but not Macs.
You make a good point of Apples ‘HD’ format not really being HD at all. Furthermore, I think the term HD is spurious. As screen quality has in the past few years approached ‘Normal’ quality; that is to say, things on the screen are starting to look like how we see things ‘normally’, I think it should be ND, Normal Definition, of course. I am not so obtuse as to not realize that HD is nothing more than a marketing term, but I fear for the terms of the future. How long until a screen is labeled as Super-High-Intense-Terrific Definition? They can’t get any better than reality, so eventually they will have to resort to the old standard…just calling it television.
The hair is split, thanks.
I totally agree (, Brownlee): the notion is silly. Which is why I wonder howcome you post about this issue, yet not about this potentially larger problem facing iTunes Store.
And by the way, in the Pro sector, I’m quite sure Avid is the de facto editing standard.
Garr, I didn’t post about it because it’s bullshit. Apple’s not going to petulantly shut down its billion dollar industry: they’ll just pass the royalties on to the consumer in a worse case scenario. It’s an empty threat.
(And, in fact, the situation has already been resolved, with no royalty hiked)
@#2, Garr: De facto? Quite sure?
TVBEurope
I find this argument similar to ones made for the Xbox 360 and Blu-Ray.
Back when there was a ‘format war’, the Xbox 360 unit shipped with a DVD drive. Later a HD-DVD drive was sold as an addon with the main unit keeping the DVD drive. When the format war ended and the HD-DVD drive discontinued, there was wild speculation that Microsoft would come out with a similar Blu-Ray addon drive, much like the HD-DVD setup.
By that time, Microsoft has already established video streaming and purchasing on the Xbox. A functionality which makes more profit than investing in new hardware. This was also around the time they started negotiations with NetFlix and feature locking the ‘New Xbox Experience’; a major software upgrade to the Xbox 360 OS. Once this is released in November, the Xbox is more reliant on media delivery though the Internet than on physical disks and hardware.
By contrast, Sony totes the Playstation 3 as a Blu-Ray player as its media advantage. They recently rolled out internet media delivery, but with a very stark difference to other venues with any platform: You ‘buy’ a video that you can only download once. They’ll get a purchase or two out of the user, but no more once the user finds they can’t get the first purchase back.
To note, the Wii does not play in this area of media. This is mostly due to the lack of ties and investment in other forms of media. Nintendo doesn’t have a media empire or major operating system like it’s competitors.
What does this all mean? To me it shows that the ‘format war’ had a hidden third player: The Internet. Physical things are expensive. The costs of creating and shipping physical things are much more expensive than delivering bits. This is why Microsoft and Apple are not invested in Blu-Ray; They don’t have to worry about developing, manufacturing, and delivering physical goods for media delivery. Just pay bandwidth.
There is a slight difference with Apple in that their hardware is also marketed as a media creation device, and technically can benefit from having a Blu-Ray burner for media creators to make Blu-Ray disks. Who will play these discs is unknown to me (see previous point).
Tubman, I’m not relying on numerical statistics in my statement. Rather, I was going by personal experience (as a film student, and what I’ve seen and heard among local and international productions)
Mac’s will get Blu-Ray being that they are great for rich multimedia projects such as photography and digital editing. Blu-Ray has a huge capacity for storing this information. Great for backing up the important information.