It’s Showtime for Apple

There was a time when Apple waited for the right conference to roll around before making its big announcements of the year. MacWorld on both coasts and the WWDC conferences used to be the events where Jobs unveiled his biggest prizes.

Then Apple stopped coming to the east coast MacWorld and of late, has not made a groundbreaking announcement at the other two conferences either.

This has not meant, however, that Apple has stopped making spectacular announcements. If Apple stopped going to the conferences, the conferences came to Apple.

That is what is happening on the 12th of September. Apple has called a press event with cryptic digital invites that show the Apple logo with spotlights—the kind they have on the 20th Century Fox intro—and the words “It’s Showtime” below. The event is to be held in San Francisco and will coincide with the Paris Apple Expo. The word is that the event will be broadcast in London and at the Paris event.

The implication of the invite is obvious. At the very least, Apple wants us to think that it is about to launch a movie store in the same model as iTunes music store. There are only two real questions, though: will this be the full extent of Apple’s announcement? And, what can Apple do differently that will make this catch on the way the its music store did?

Let me tackle the second question first. Part of the power of Apple’s music store is that it was offering something that no large company had offered yet- individual songs. You could get away with spending a couple of dollars at a time, which led to a lot more impulse buys and a lot more purchases based on what was that catchy song playing in the mall this morning? At ninety-nine cents, that is an easy sale. It will be tough for an Apple movie store to have that appeal until people have real media centers.

This brings me to my first question: will a movie store be the full extent of the announcement? The Apple iTunes music store needed a widely used iPod, easy-to-use iTunes software to get people to switch to the digital format, and the ability to easily burn CDs. For a movie store to catch on, all of these elements need to be in place. There need to be easy-to-use devices that allow people to view their downloaded movies on their favorite TV and easy to use software to manage those movies. And, people should be allowed to burn DVDs.

The software already exists, however broken and feature-poor it may be. The iTunes software already manages movies and Front Row already is Apple’s media centre software. The real trouble is a device that allows people to watch movies at their convenience without a long and tedious DVD burning process.

There may be many answers to that issue—a larger screen iPod, a portable video device, or a media centre Mac Mini are all viable options. Each of these must feature easy-to-use software and must have the ability to plug into a television for this service to really take off. Apple has done it in the past and the only hitch that may hold them back is the film industry itself.