| Thursday, April 5, 2007 |
09:01 - It's the content, stupid. Unless it isn't.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Apr04/0,4670,TechTestAppleTV,00.html
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Here's a weird review of the Apple TV (via JMH) comparing it to the Xbox 360. With a headline like "Apple Appalls Where Xbox Excels", one's eyebrows are perked up from the get-go; but the nutshell version seems to be that the Apple TV beats the crap out of the Xbox by every measure—except the quality of the video sent to the TV.
Apple currently doesn't sell any HD content through iTunes, whereas Microsoft does (or at least it rents it). But apparently even on standard-definition video, the Apple TV's video quality is noticeably worse. The reviewer is skeptical that full-resolution HD content from iTunes will look very good. But what I wonder is, if these are digital devices, how is it that one can look good and the other not? Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to export an Xbox video to a computer to do a side-by-side comparison with an iTunes-purchased one; so at this point the difference could well be purely in the content, couldn't it?
If that's the case, then this becomes a question of whether iTunes' content is being offered as well as it could be. I've never been particularly overjoyed by the prospect of paying $15 for a gigabyte-sized movie that I own and thus have to find backup space for; in the case of movies, whose replay value is sharply limited compared to music or even TV shows, renting makes a hell of a lot more sense. (And if Microsoft rents HD-grade movies for the Xbox, that's got to take up a lot more space than iTunes movies do—and as the article says, they go onto a hard drive that's half the size of the Apple TV's, although the reviewer then goes on to perplexingly criticize the Apple TV for having a small hard drive.) Apple has been increasing the resolution and quality of its video offerings since it started (they're now twice the size they used to be), but on one or two occasions I've noticed video glitches (such as in the South Park episode "Cat Orgy", which tech support apologized to me for and gave me a free video credit—but not a re-download of a fixed version of that episode, which I thought was rather low-rent of them). Their 640 x whatever widescreen movies clearly have to be upsampled to go to an HD set, and they haven't exactly wowed me with their transfer quality. So it's entirely possible that iTunes content isn't going to look good piped through anything to your TV, and the Apple TV isn't to blame here.
But that's small consolation—because ultimately it's all about the content, and if iTunes isn't prepared to deliver competitive quality, it doesn't matter how slick the interface is. What people want is the same quality as DVD—as indistinguishable from DVD as AAC is from CD—before they're willing to completely switch their media of choice. I hope Apple is reading articles like this and has a competitive analysis lab on campus that's coming to the same conclusions; because the people fiddling with the Apple TV today are early-adopters and video geeks, and they're going to be unforgiving if this solution doesn't purport to meet their needs right out of the box.
I have an Apple TV, though it hasn't yet been set up (waiting for a bunch of component cables); when it has been, I'll be able to do a side-by-side comparison of iTunes TV shows versus the exact same ones on DVD. Movies aren't yet ready for a fair comparison (and I think iTunes' for-purchase model prices me out of the market, frankly), so unless and until Apple decides to rent HD content on the same model as Microsoft does, that will be a more difficult comparison to make. But as of now I'm not surprised if it's less than stellar. Owning a sub-DVD-quality movie versus renting an HD-quality one ain't the intangible value that Steve might think it is.
UPDATE: Jason Snell is much happier with the video quality than the Fox reviewer, apparently.
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Brian Tiemann
