Apple rolls out ... wait, scratch that, iTV not ready

Are Apple's events getting ahead of the company? A special event now arrives on a swell of speculation about what Silicon Valley's leading innovator will announce: an Apple-designed cellular phone that will finally solve all the irritations found in today's gadget-riddled phones; an iPod with an extra-wide display and touchscreen interface; and, my ongoing favorite, an Apple PDA (or tablet Mac) that resurrects the abandoned Newton operating system.

In the case of the "It's Showtime" event on Sept. 12, the real announcements turned out to be the items that everyone took for granted: updated iPods, downloadable full-length movies from the iTunes Store, and a trademark "one more thing" most notable not because it's a digital set-top box (more on that later) but because Apple chose to bring it out of hiding so early.

In the face of such intense conjecture, can Apple stay ahead of itself? Last week's announcements offer a few clues.

After introducing a higher-capacity iPod (80 GB), a nano update and a tiny Shuffle, Steve Jobs showed off the product that garnered the most attention at the special event: downloadable full-length movies via the iTunes Store. New releases cost $13 for the first two weeks they're available, and then move up to $15 thereafter; some older titles cost $10.

Movies have been a foregone conclusion since Apple announced video playback on the iPod last year, but I'm guessing Apple isn't 100 percent thrilled about taking the service live right now. Currently, the only movie studio represented is Disney (which enjoys a close relationship with Apple now that Jobs is on the board of directors), and the selection comprises only 128 titles as of this week.

But Apple didn't have much of a choice in its timing. The iTunes Music Store's first appearance enabled the company to jump in front of the market for legally purchased music downloads and has been enormously successful. And if you remember, the song selection wasn't huge then, but Apple gradually and consistently built it up over time.

For movies, it's important that Apple plants its flag right now, because it's not the earliest player. Amazon.com launched its Unbox service a few days before Apple's announcement, though with spotty results: the service doesn't work on Macs, files are larger and take longer to download (although the image quality is higher), and the software required to play the movies has significant licensing restrictions.

Apple needs to demonstrate that its approach is superior, and convince the movie studios that they'll make more money from Apple's service than the competitors.

Early results are encouraging, with 125,000 downloads in the first week ringing up about $1 million in sales for Disney, according to Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger. However, I'm sure a huge percentage of that amount was made up of folks (like me) who are kicking the tires.

Apple claims "near-DVD quality" for its movies and television shows, which are sized at 640 x 480 pixels (double the previous resolution) and encoded with the QuickTime-based H.264 encoding. The quality won't seriously rival a DVD, but it's not bad either. Unless you're hypersensitive about the image quality, you probably won't notice when played back on a regular television.

Ah, but bridging the gap between computer and television is a big problem for most people, unless they already have a Mac attached to the television. In my case, I connected my PowerBook G4 to my television using an S-video cable, and ran sound out the audio-out port to an old stereo tuner; the MacBook and MacBook Pro models don't include S-video ports, requiring an adapter to connect composite video and audio.

Since I don't normally push video from my Mac to my TV, making this work took a considerable bit of connecting and disconnecting cables, and reaching around behind equipment. Another option would be to purchase Apple's iPod AV Connection Kit ($100) and play the movie directly from a video-enabled iPod.

If only there were a better way ...

Enter iTV. Steve Jobs ended the special event with a rare look at an unfinished product, code-named iTV until a final name is chosen. To give you an idea of how out of the ordinary this is, imagine Coke publishing most of the secret recipe for Coca-Cola on its Web site. Apple never discloses anything it doesn't have to.

iTV is a small $300 set-top box, shipping sometime in the first quarter of 2007, that streams multimedia content to your television. The iTV comes with an Apple remote control and software similar to Front Row to control playback without connecting a Mac directly to the television. It will also apparently download some content from the Internet, such as movie trailers and special features from the iTunes Store, but it's not clear whether you can purchase movies directly using the iTV.

Why the early revelation? Selling movies from the iTunes Store leads directly to displaying them on a television, and Apple couldn't let that last piece remain ambiguous for five or six months. It's also a bit of rare Apple FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt, a potent mixture perfected by another company in these parts) at the start of the holiday-buying season. Apple is hoping that people who've decided to upgrade their TVs this Christmas will wait for the iTV rather than turn to a service such as Unbox that limits playback to a single computer and (non-iPod) portable player.

More important, the iTV reveals Apple's model for digital entertainment: content purchased from the iTunes Store that can be played on an iPod or a television (or both) with a minimum of fuss. That kind of system requires people to buy into the concept as much as the hardware and software. iTV isn't just a set-top box, it's part of a solution, and Apple loves to pitch a good solution — one that can give Apple the advantage that it enjoyed when it first began selling music.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for

The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com.

More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.