At yesterday’s Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs announced a new version of the Apple TV appliance which includes movie rentals in HD quality. This last fact, ladies and gentlemen, is huge news.
Instead of forcing consumers to enter the compatibility hell that is HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, Apple extends the proven iTunes infrastructure to support high-definition movies and at the same time gives people a good-looking, easy-to-use, and comparably cheap platform to put in their living room right next to their TV.
Forget DVD, forget HD-DVD, forget Blu-ray. Acquiring movies online in awesome quality and playing them on your TV, your laptop, your desktop computer, your iPod, or your phone for that matter is the future. It must not necessary be Apple who wins this game. They have to some extent fucked up selling music in iTunes and it looks like Amazon is passing them currently. But what is important is that someone is seriously starting the competition.
I for one welcome our new HD overlords.