Apple movie rentals, what about HD?
There is a lot of buzz in the media industry around Apple plans to offer video rentals in January. I have even seen articles saying that this may mean the end of Blockbuster and even NetFlix. I don’t see why. If Apple only plans to make their current movie catalog available for rent, they will hardly become a threat to anyone. Why? Simply because of the poor video quality they currently offer, which may be enough for an iPod, but certainly not for a big flat-screen TV.
Offering rentals in addition to movie purchases will not change this fact. To be really competitive and win new customers, Apple needs to offer a much larger movie selection but foremost they need to move to HD, and that probably means moving to 720p. So far, not a single rumor has indicated that this will be the case. That means that either that may be the secret Steve Jobs is keeping for MacWorld or that this new effort will not create a major breakthrough in terms of new users moving to iTunes to get their movies.
I know that there are many out there who have still not adopted HD. Nintendo for example is making a killing selling the Wii to customers who do not care about HD and that is fine. However, when you sell a device like the AppleTV which does not advertise support for resolutions less than 480p and favors connecting to a TV through an HDMI connector, that is obviously not the public you are targeting.
Right now Apple offers three devices that could display HD content, the AppleTV, the iPhone and the iPod touch. Add to that all the Macintosh line of computers. However, Apple also offers two other devices, the iPod nano and the iPod classic which do not offer the proper display size ratio to support HD content. That means that moving to HD would leave out many recently released products. That doesn’t make much sense. If Apple chooses to move to HD they will probably have to keep offering regular content for many of their customers. That could explain some of the rumors about variable content pricing. It may turn out that the price will not vary based on the content, but instead based on the resolution of the content. That would be more in line with what Apple is already doing with iTunes plus.
Of course, right now all what I have been saying is purely speculative. However, if Apple wants to compete effectively in the media server arena, they will need to move to HD at some point, even if it is just to match what others are already doing. MacWorld seems to be the perfect occasion to announce such a move and in my opinion this would be a far more important announcement than just movie rentals.