09 Jan 2007 0957H

The Macworld Keynote, convergence, irrelevance of BluRay and HD-DVD

And I’m expecting to hear something biggish. Apple’s been quiet for too long. As we blogged about back in September, I think today is the day that we hear something about convergence around Steve’s fantasy digital hub, which my friend Juhn always jokes about. (Bill Gates has been fantasizing about the digital home for decades, so, everyone has their pet project.) Everything that Apple has been moving towards, strategically, has been trying to create and control the conditions for that market. There are some great blogs that talk about that, here and here, for instance. (My favorite quote in the last link: “Customers do not know what they want to buy. We have to tell them.”)

I think there are barriers to true convergence: the distribution mechanism is really the big problem here. If iTunes expands its offerings of movies and television episodes, and adopts some kind of distributed, megabit server seeding mechanism like BitTorrent so that speedy downloads become commonplace, then I can see the era of HD downloadable content becoming a reality, whereby one could just do away with clunky disc rental setups like Blockbuster and Netflix and just go straight to drive, like Movielink, Vongo and the other players. Even XBox Live now offers movies and tv.

If broadband downloads of media are a reality — and I can tell you, for me, that’s how I watch TV — that is also why I think the so-called war of BluRay and HD-DVD is also a non-issue. We also now have holographic recording media which stores terabytes of data if one so chose to do so. But for most people, it’s clear that the behavior is watch and dispose.

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