Apple could be setting sights on 1080p

Matt Lincoln Russell (Lincoln)

August 7, 2008 1:14 PM ET in News, ,

Recent speculation about a chip change in Apple’s product line has been rife since July 21, when CFO Peter Oppenheimer said to expect a dip in profits from a “product transition”. However, Apple has flatly denied a move away from Intel CPUs or chipsets, which was most peoples’ first guess.

Cringley thinks the news is related to a year-old story about Apple adding a H.264 chip that both decodes and encodes. Cringley explains:

The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they’ve already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they’ll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.

The theory goes that Apple is moving to corner the HD market in its iTunes store a full year before other companies can develop a competing technology. This comes on the heels of not-so-recent news that Apple has taken the #1 spot in music distribution in the US, finally surpassing Wal-Mart. It’s possible they’re on track to do the same with HD video content.

Blu-ray? Isn’t that how they used to do HD back when we used optical media?

2 Comments:

  1. Snarkasm
    7 Aug '08, 5:50 pm

    How is this "cornering the market" when things like the xBox Marketplace let you download and watch HD video for the last few months or more? Seems to me they're the one catching up to the trend, but with their installed base, they might soon do so.

    Either way, I don't see them becoming the only supplier, and especially if this relies on the AppleTV. Do any of Apple's computers even have 1080p screens? If it is a new HD chip, and it's coming packaged in "all new hardware lines," how many people are really going to rush out and pick up the new MacBooks? Particularly in this economy right now. Then again, it is Apple...

    I figure it'll be great if you don't have a streaming box of any kind right now and want to go get the new AppleTV. But if you have the old one, are you going to go out and replace it? If you have a 360 with Netflix integration or a regular computer with Netflix's streaming service, are you going to go get new hardware knowing Netflix is working on HD streaming delivery? If you have access to a video store, are you going to go with a download vs an actual disc?

    I don't know, but I don't see them pushing out MS, Netflix, and other video streamers in the near future. They'll certainly easily catch up, thanks to the Apple army and the relative state of streaming HD and its market penetration, but I don't see a single player in the market any time soon.

    Of course, this is just Cringely, too.

  2. Nomad
    7 Aug '08, 8:28 pm

    I've read no contents of this thread, but I'm sure it will be $6,000,000.

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