Apple’s downloadable movies – who cares?

Ask you mother about downloadable movies and she’ll probably look at you as if you’ve been taking drugs. She’ll probably say something along the lines of  “movies, we’ve been getting those for fifty years on the TV”. Obviously, mum just doesn’t get it – or does she?

With the expected announcement from Apple, mid morning today, that it will be further entering the downloadable movie market, there are those who would join in the chorus of “who cares”.

Interestingly, the case against downloadable movies was made by Steve Job’s himself many years ago when asked about the likelihood of a video iPod. Mr Job’s reply was that he couldn’t really see a market for small screened devices playing movies and that the beauty of music was that it didn’t require ‘immersion’ – that is, you can listen to music driving the car or on your 20 minute trip to work, but a movie needs to be a totally different experience. We’re sure that lawmakers wouldn’t be too happy if everyone started movies in the front seat of their cars on the way to work.

So we, like other pundits and observers are very curious about what Mr Jobs will announce, if its another video download service then we’re sure it’ll do well, but it won’t change the world. Sure, Apple will garner slightly more revenue if it takes on the local blockbuster store – but unless you happen to have a 40 inch plasma attached to your Mac or PC we don’t think you’ll be happy to sit at your 20 inch iMac for two hours in your home office watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster movie.

This correspondent is lucky enough (some would say geeky enough) to have such a set up – but it still cannot replace the simplicity of popping a DVD into the player and hitting go, instead of setting up a PC/Mac and having emails ‘boing’ quarter of the way through a movie – and then there’s the whining – yes the whining of the hard disk – basically its all to difficult.

We look forward to what Mr Jobs has to say – but if it’s another download service, then we’ll bail out half way and pop down to the local blockbuster store.