Take a look at most retailers and the DVDs that are doing the roaring trade aren’t necessarily movies – the boom in TV show DVDs and box sets hasn’t been missed by the boys over at Cupertino.
But it’s not disc sales that has dollar signs filling the eyes of Apple executives.
It’s rentals.
The new Apple products released yesterday are almost more notable for the features that are missing than for those they include. For the new iPod nano, there’s no video recording, no video playback, no widescreen LCD panel.
For the AppleTV, there’s now no storage. Apple has rightly hit on the idea that storage in a media streamer is virtually pointless – you’ll never have enough. It’s like those hard drive-based personal video recorders (PVRs). They’re almost useless because no matter how much storage you get inside one, it’ll never be enough, You’ll always run out of space trying to load in that next movie.
So Apple ditched the storage and instead, wants you renting your favourite TV shows and movies instead.
In Australia, the cost for HD (1280×720-pixel) movies starts at $AUD4.99 while SD-resolution (720×480-pixel) movies will rent for $AUD3.99 – that and the bandwidth on your broadband account to go with it. According to Apple, it’s $6.99 for new release HD movies, $4.99 for library HD titles, $5.99 for SD new releases and $3.99 for SD library titles. You get 30 days to watch the movie and can watch it as many times as you want in 48 hours.
It’s all designed to work through the new iTunes 10.
AppleTV’s biggest competition in Australia will be the Telstra T-box. The two are somewhat different (T-Box delivers free-to-air TV along with internet TV) but they overlap in the TV/DVD/Movie rental market that’s fast starting to hot up in Australia.
What it will more probably do is provide yet another nail in the coffin for the local DVD rental store. If we needed any pointers on how digital movie rental has affected the traditional DVD rental store, it came this week with news in the US that the big Blockbuster video store chain is set to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Blockbuster is reportedly weighed down with US$1billion in debt and will use the Chapter 11 move to restructure it and close under-performing stores.
Combine the growth in digital rental (not to mention BitTorrent) and it’s hard to see it ending happily ever after for traditional bricks-and-mortar rental stores.