dongmin said:
Steve topped off the Sony presentation by saying:
"You know, we do work very closely with Sony on digital still cameras and these new camcorders, which is really great. And who knows, maybe someday, computers and music too."
Could Sony be BOWING out of the music download business? Maybe they'll finally get on the AAC/Fairplay bandwagon.
That's quite possible, Sony's MP3 players aren't doing quite as well as I am sure they had hoped. The inability of several of their devices to play non-ATRAC files (notably the mini disc players and some of their harddrive based players) is pretty much a sales killer. My theory, however, is that Sony and Apple will cross license their DRM schemes to one another. Adding the ability to play AAC/Fariplay tracks to the Sony players will give them a good shot at increased sales, and while Apple won't likely see any spikes in iTunes downloads or iPods sales, what they WILL get is future legal protection.
The iPod and iTMS combo are starting to become pretty ubiquitos(sp?) and it's only a matter of time before other companis start to complain about monopoly status and feature bullying, etc. By having a whole seperate line of players that are iTunes compatible they can protect the store, and having a whole other store that iPod users can shop at, they protect the player as well. Makes sense in my head anyways ;-) .
Also, as Apple doesn't seem to have any sort of removable memory format preference as of yet, there could be a Sony Memory Stick readers built into future Macs. Especially a future Mac Mini type computer that is designed as a home entertainment type device.
The iTMS style movie store is HIGHLY plausable as well. Both players are probably hot to get into the business (Sony makes lots of devices that could be used to watch movies... high end cell phones, TiVos, PDAs, computers, PS2/3, PSP, etc, etc), and Apple has the market experience on online media download, and likely wants to expand on that.
It could be a big success if they price it right, and make it properly convienient... Ya, you guys with 30" ACDs will probably want to watch it on your computer, but the rest of us want to see it on our TV, and easily. If they can sell a movie that iDVD will burn to a DVD-r for your future use (I imagine they could even include CSS coding pretty easily) for, say, $10 for the newest releases, $8 for some bargain new releases, and all the way down to $4 for older movies, they could have a big seller. I'm not sure if a "rental watch at your computer" scheme would be wildly popular, unless...
Apple and Sony team up to make a PVR system that uses an OS X theme for the interface, integrates over a network to your Mac for video extraction, editing, etc, and can download movies from the iMovie Video Store, that stay on there till you watch it a few times (say three plays?) or 2 weeks, whichever is first. Those movies would of course be non extractale, etc, as they would be rentals.
The key to this device would be to develop an interface that is THEMED like OS X (which the iPods is, in a way - just more so in this case), and have the 'box' be super stylish, like all Apple products. iLief integration is a must; need to be able to pull video off the player (like the new TiVoToGo system), and just as importantly, move video TO it directly from iMovie. Let people edit up Bobbies baseball game video and store it on the PVR so they can show it to Grandma when she comes over for dinner. Price HAS to be $399 or less (you can buy a whole Apple computer for $499, so they need to get under that, imo), with no service fees (they'd have to make their cash from iMVS).
Wow, this is long, no one will read it =p
Rob
