Appletell

No, I’m not talking about the iPhone you tried to jailbreak a few months back. Rumors have been flying about Apple’s next “One More Thing” announcement that’s supposed to happen at an October 14th Apple event. The common theme in many of these rumors is the “brick.” But what exactly is this brick?

It’s pretty doubtful Apple would name any of its products the “Brick,” so I think it’s safe to assume that if this turns out to be real, it’s a codename. There are two rumors circulating, and iPhone Savior is reporting on both of them. Sadly, both of them are exciting, and logic would dictate that only one could be the brick. Even still, I’m hoping for both.

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Since its introduction by Apple on January 9th, 2001, iTunes has become one of the most popular music library organization apps ever.  It started off simple and eventually became what it is today, a place not only to organize files, but to shop, learn, and watch.  With so much growth, large deals, and new features in the past few years, it makes me wonder where iTune’s place will be in the future.  When digital sales take over physical media, will it be because of iTunes?  Will iTunes one day start a revolution in how we purchase and handle all of our DVDs, music, and TV shows?  Or will iTunes eventually slip away into the past and be replaced by a whole new app or movement?

With the direction iTunes is headed now, it seems like it very well could be the driving force behind moving totally to digital sales for some.  It has one of the biggest music selections available anywhere, allows you to rent movies, releases new DVD titles the same day as hard copies, and contains all sort of other media, such as podcasts and TV shows.  With only a couple more deals and updates, iTunes could soon be the place to go for all of your media.  This would almost completely eliminate the need for physical media.  Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think this will happen anytime very soon, but it is possible.  But what would seal the deal for moving completely to digital media?

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NetBlender recently released an SDK App for the iPhone and iPod touch that allows it to interface with BD Live and Wifi Enabled Blu-Ray Players.  It is called BD Touch.  When combined with a Blu-Ray authoring application, such as NetBlender’s DoStudio, the app allows an iPhone or iPod Touch to seamlessly connect to a Blu-Ray Player via Wifi, enabling the iPhone or iPod touch to act as a remote, among other things.  You can add compressed version of the movie to your collection, control playback from the iPhone or iPod Touch and import certain menu content.  Also provided on the iPhone is movie information from the internet, links to more information, a link to the movie in iTunes, and even the ability to play games and other special features directly on the iPhone. 

Also, the app is not limited to Blu-Ray to iPhone/iPod Touch communication.  You can send movies from your iTunes collection through the iPhone/iPod Touch to the Blu-Ray Player, out onto the big screen.  Some compatible Blu-Ray producers include Phillips, Samsung, and Sony, including the Blu-Ray Drive in the Playstation 3.

You will soon be able to use your iPhone or iPod Touch to control and do much more with your Blu-ray player. NetBlender will release a new technology this week, on April 10th, that links Blu-ray content to Apple devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch. They call this new technology BD Touch, and it will use the iPhone’s network capabilities to control your Blu-ray player.

“The sophisticated user interface of the iPhone enables greater user interaction as well as the power to leverage the iPhone’s existing network.  Search, e-commerce and advertising possibilities related to movie content abound when one imagines real-time communication between the iPhone and the content currently being displayed on a Blu-ray player,”

A number of other features will be supported by BD Touch, too. Including automatically updating film collections on your iPhone, and your Blu-ray player sending a digital copy of a video to your iPhone.

Via [Macworld UK]

Shaw Wu of American Technology Research is one of the many analysts making predictions on Apple’s third generation version of Apple TV. His predictions remain similar to those of many others: Apple will most likely include digital video recorder functionality (as reported) and will transform the Apple TV that we know into a TiVo-like device, or “real business” instead of just a “hobby,” as stated by Wu. He estimates that it will only cost Apple $12-$15 extra to add DVR components to Apple TV, but will benefit the company greatly in sales and popularity of the device.

Apple is also said to adopt the new Blu-ray standard, and build it into its future products, specifically Macintosh computers, which can mean a lot for the future of many of Apple’s products, including Apple TV. Wu believes that Apple is in its “final discussions” with Sony regarding adopting the new high definition standard, despite Apple’s current stance which is heavily pushing the HD capabilities of the iTunes store.

If all of these predictions are to come true, Apple is soon to see a huge boom in sales and adoption of its products among consumers. Mostly to benefit is Apple TV, which is currently seeing the least in sales among Apple’s popular products.

We keeping hearing rumors about Apple moving over to Blu-Ray in laptops and desktop computers. I’ve got a few theories of why Apple will never use Blu-ray for Macs. Before I speculate of why the format won’t be coming, Apple signed up for Blu-Ray about 3 years ago! Since then, they haven’t done anything and probably won’t in the future.

Movie rentals. Apple is pushing them hard to succeed and putting Blu-Ray players in Macs will lower the chances of buying sales/rentals of HD content from iTunes. Blu-ray has all the major vendors in the movie industry, and Apple still hasn’t hit 1,000 movies in the iTunes Store.

No optical drive in MacBook Air. Apple told us that we don’t need a DVD player to watch movies, the iTunes Store works fine. If they don’t want us watching DVDs, it won’t be any different for Blu-ray movies.

Professional applications don’t yet support Blu-ray. Rober X. Crinigely of the PBS predicts. Even though this is a valid missing link, he says that this would be a lame excuse to not use the format.

Why don’t you think Apple hasn’t switched to Blu-Ray yet?