I’m one of those people who has an Apple problem. This year it looks like, as expected, the big announcements are an iPod phone and a set-top box. Both of them look pretty cool to me.
Another interesting tidbit is that Apple reports having sold 1.3 million movies in the first four months. That’s obviously a drop in the bucket compared to total DVD sales, but it’s likely to be a significant fraction of high-definition DVD sales. The Wall Street Journal reports that there are about 700,000 DVD players in homes right now. If we assume that each of those customers have purchased 8 DVDs (which is probably high, since many of those “DVD players” are actually PS3s), then total high-def DVD sales are in the ballpark of six million units, meaning that Apple has sold about 20 percent as many movies as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD put together. And that’s with only one studio’s movies (Disney’s) on offer.
Of course, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD boast higher picture quality, so this isn’t an entirely fair comparison. But Apple (and other online vendors) can more easily ramp up picture quality as higher bandwidth becomes available. So it’s at least possible that the winner of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle will be “none of the above.”
Update: Of course I meant that there are 700,000 high-definition DVD players.
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