The big news out of Cupertino at Apple’s yearly “Music Event” wasn’t the products they announced but the quality of the live streaming video. Many years ago Apple used to live stream big Apple events and they were pretty torturish to watch, the video would break up and fall behind the audio, the biggest viewing size that could be called decent was 320x240 and at that Apple was only serving 50,000 simultaneous feeds.
I don’t know how many simultaneous streams they fed to today, I’m sure it was in the hundreds of thousands. In order to watch the stream live Apple required Safari 5 and Mac OS 10.6 and presumably these contained the necessary latest developments in HTML5 hooks required. The thing is, watching full screen on my 1600x1200 monitor the video was near perfect and better than any streaming video I’ve ever seen. I saw comments by others who felt the same.
This bodes particularly well for Apple which is slowly moving their working model to cloud computing for iTunes and an increasingly dynamic MobileMe. This broadcast may well have been driven from Apple’s new North Carolina server farm which is huge even by Google’s standards. What it demonstrates is that Apple has the capacity to stream impressive HD quality video to a lot of people simultaneously.
As to the actual products announced, there were improvements all around and from a stock investor point of view the refresh of the iPod line will keep sales chugging along.
*The iPod classic was dropped. (correction, the Classic remains unchanged) Audiophiles will despair, few others will notice. (correction, Audiophiles will sigh with relief, few others will notice)
*The refreshed shuffle with the return of the click wheel was an Apple acknowledgdment that last year’s bottonless shuffle was a mistake. Last year’s shuffle was a minimalists dream but less than optimal for real users. The only thing the current shuffle has going for it is its price.
*The iPod Nano is taking over from the shuffle. It’s got a small perfectly formed square screeen with a simple touch interface using tap and twist finger movements which beats the heck out of the shuffle’s blind UI. It rotates so that its always “right side up” and has other clever Applesque features that make it lust worthy. To get there while keeping the price down the iPod Nano loses its camera and can’t play video anymore. Except for the most price sensitive buyer, it’s the best iPod Shuffle ever.
*The iPod Touch becomes super thin and gets the iPhone’s Retina dipsplay but not the iPhone’s lust worthy case. As one of the leading portable gaming devices, the addition of the A4 processor and Apple’s new gaming centre as well as the iPhone’s sophisticated gyro sensors will keep the “touch” as the portable game machine to beat. With iOS 4 and FaceTime the iPod Touch will continue to be the leading iPod and with Skype, gmail phone and FaceTime its a cheap internet based phone. Another secret of the iPod Touches popularity is its use as a business machine running bespoke apps with the dock interface interfacing with hardware.
*Like Google, Apple hasn’t been successful in making social media tools so the changes to iTunes as a kind of Music Facebook is an experiment which Apple will study with its relentlessly critical gaze. It’s also a potentially powerful data collection tool which will give Apple a lot of new data for iADs and other sales uses.
*AppleTV. It could’ve been a contender but Apple refuses to take a step too far and thus IMO AppleTV will remain in hobby mode until vastly more content is available. In the USA the addition of NetFlix is a step beyond the somewhat mediocre Apple store for video and tv. But aside from NetFlix and the usual suspects (youtube, flickr, etc) the new AppleTV is too tethered to the limitations of Apple’s video offering. Outside the USA the situation is even more dire as NetFlix is North American only. Where is BBC iPlayer and other independent sources of video? Without them, we’ve got another meh hobby. Or can someone figure out how to jailbreak the new AppleTV and allow apps. Stick a UI on that £99 toy and you’ve got something worth watching.
Steve was healthy looking and in relatively good form. The audience looked less surly than the iPhone AntennaGate PR event audience.
Some dude who teaches Journalism at a big NY City journalism school at a name University was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that the media should stop giving a $270 billion dollar company so much free publicity. He’s probably right, today’s event was better than one from Sony or Motorola or Intel perhaps but it really wasn’t worth all the year-hours of print and pixels that led up to the event. But that just leaves us with the reality that for better and worse an enormous number of people are interested in the “Apple Story” and will read pages and pages of pap when Apple appears in the headline. It’s a faustian pact but journalism today depends on advertising to feed the costs of journalism and advertising is based on eyeballs reading the articles and the way to get eyeballs to your stories are to put Apple in the headline and watch the page views ramp up.
Today’s offerings will keep the music/TV revenue streams cranking along but only the quality of today’s streaming was worthy of headlines. hmmm….
