Air Ships, Movies on Hold - APPLE take 3?

The Macbook Air started shipping today! Meeting the predicted sale dates.

Apple also announced that the free Apple TV software update enabling movie rentals is not quite finished and will now be available in another week or two.

Delays are nothing new to Apple, but it's better that they launch the update with a solid code release, as the Take 2 Movie rental system needs to be bug free, so Apple can hit the ground running in it's fight to take on Amazon Unbox.

Most iPod users are finding out the the .WMV format needs to be converted to .MP4(h.264) in order to play Unbox movies on thier iPods. Looks like both companies will hopefully end up creating a price war, and heat up the DRM Free issue in the Movie Purchase download arena.

                

Which One? Take Two Apple TV or UNBOX Amazon

Apple TV and Take Two

I like the idea of Take Two and its integration with the Apple TV appliance, but then again using Tivo to Unbox is also a nice feature. Since both movie download services are set to go head to head for consumer spending in 2008, we will have to see what shakes out.

Take 2 – Apples new movie download service will be shipped out as part of the new Apple TV units as well as a downloadable client for PC and Mac users. With promises of over 100 titles and more to be added quickly it could make the Apple TV the video appliance everyone wants to own. Again I think that it’s going to depend on what price points Apple, The Movie and TV industry try to set for a digital copy. It’s also been stated that if you only use the Apple TV appliance and not the PC or Mac program to download the media, your media files will be stuck on the Apple TV appliance.

Apple Take Two Media Encoding: MP4

Unbox – Now Unbox right now is limited to the United States, the user billing page doesn’t accept a postal code as instructed and the provinces are missing from the drop down. I’m sure that if it takes off and to compete with Take Two, Unbox will roll out to the rest of the Amazon locations by the end of the year if not sooner.

Unbox, uses the WMV(Windows Media Video) file format and comes with Tivo Support.

So, what do you use, I guess it depends on $$, which is cheaper. What devices you own.

You can always convert from mp4 to dvd or wmv to dvd with video converters.

Apple TV with Take 2, will stream the video from any PC or Mac Video source, so it does make it appealing. Maybe when my current stack of DVD-r and my DIVx player breaks, I’ll look into these two options further.