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Apple, Comcast Push HD Movie Services

Jan 17, 2008  •  Post A Comment

As Sony and Toshiba responded to Warner Bros.’ recent decision to exclusively back Sony’s Blu-ray high-definition DVD player format, Comcast and Apple used technology conferences this month to push their own technologies in the battle for home-based HD movie purchases.
Last week, Comcast said it would quadruple its monthly movie inventory to more than 6,000 titles, with about half of those in HD. The company, presenting at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, also said its high-speed Internet customers would be able to download HD movies in less than four minutes by next year.
The latter service would compete with Apple’s iTunes music and movie brand. The maker of iPod media players and iMac computers said at the MacWorld conference this week that it will start letting customers download movies, with HD versions starting at $3.99 per film. Apple will boast a selection of 1,000 movies by the end of February, including 100 titles in HD.
Still, it may be years before the popularity of video downloading catches up to that of on-hand discs because of convenience and technology issues, say some analysts. An Apple TV set-top box, whose suggested retail price was cut this week to $229 from $299 to spur sales, will be required for downloading movies in HD (technology Web sites such as Engadget.com confirmed that HD downloads would be exclusively processed through Apple TV).
As a result, Apple TV, like Amazon.com’s Unbox and Vudu, may be at a disadvantage to set-top-box-free systems, say analysts.
“TiVo’s the most successful stand-alone box of all time, and it’s in only 1.7 million households,” Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group, said in an interview last week. “Those other stand-alone boxes and downloads, that’s just not there yet.”
Meanwhile, Comcast, the largest U.S. cable provider, may have to buy smaller companies in order to gain the technology necessary to make good on its promise of making a four-minute HD movie download available to most of its broadband customers, Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield wrote in a note to clients this week.
“While we do not believe there is a specific acquisition that Comcast has in mind to bolster its broadband video portal strategy, we suspect it will need to be acquisitive (to keep up with companies such as Apple),” Mr. Greenfield wrote.

113 Comments

  1. As always, the key question is what “HD” actually means as Apple and Comcast are using the term.
    For example, the AppleTV device maxes out at 720p resolution. It’s unknown what Comcast will provide, but cable and satellite companies regularly downres HD programming to 1440x108i, a resolution HDTV owners deride as “HD Lite,” but still greater than anything the Apple TV device can provide.
    Meanwhile, neither will provide audio with the new high data rate, lossless or low compression codecs the next generation disc formats provide. The next generation disc formats provide full 1920x1080p HD video – higher quality than over-the-air ATSC broadcasts can (especially as more stations add picture quality-robbing subchannels for useless programming like “Weather Plus.”)
    The bottom line is this is a turning point; both Blu-Ray and HD DVD are capable of providing HD pictures and sound vastly superior to any other format available today, certainly superior to what most people have ever experienced in their home. Will customers instead choose the far inferior resolution product provided by Apple and likely Comcast’s downloads?
    Unfortunately one need only look at the success of downloading regular television content now to see the answer to that.

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