Apple’s Digital Media Trinity Coming Soon?

With rumors flying around about a video iPod and an Apple videos store (iMovies?) Gear Live would like to take the following opportunity to speculate wildly that Apple would secure dominance in the emerging digital multimedia market place if they do the following things:

• Launch an Apple videos store - not just music videos like iTunes has now, but full feature length movies from all the major movie houses available in (sadly a necessity) DRM’ed H.264. Apple already has the store infrastructure in place through iTunes, and the bandwidth, media savvy, and codec to pull this off.
• Apple then must produce a multimedia focused set top box - A slightly modified Mac Mini would be perfect for this. The device will need to be able to browse the movies store on a TV screen, and include a remote. They might want to include PVR software and a TV tuner, but that is neither here nor there.
• The final spire of Apple’s digital media trinity would be the video iPod to allow consumers to take (compressed) versions of their content with them wherever they go.

With all three of these key points presented to the marketplace at the same time with Apple’s legendary user interface ease of use and industrial design skills they could not only make a big splash, but gain iTunes dominance in yet another new marketplace. If they are going to do it they had better do it quick though as Microsoft is trying to make hollywood connections to do the same thing with their Windows Media Center and Portable Media Center platform, Sony has the PSP and store infrastructure and Tivo is rumored to be in the works with a video download service as well.

This coming digital media revolution will be far reaching - within 5-10 years physical media like DVD’s, HD-DVD’s, Blu-Ray, and CD’s will disappear entirely. CD sales are already starting to sag under the legal downloaded music juggernaught. Whoever gets there first with this “digital media trinity” will certainly end up with the lions share of a market that is set to replace every visual entertainment sales and rental business that we know of.

Did you hear it here first? Did Gear Live call it? Well we will have to wait and see - the industry analysts are saying to expect a big announcement come September.

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