At the launch of the new Apple Notebooks yesterday Steve Jobs called Blu Ray a bag of hurt.

His actual quote goes

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”

The licensing hasn’t stopped HP, Dell and Sony amongst others for including Blu Ray drives in their laptops.

Blu Ray’s market share is still very low at about 5% of the home video market so Steve has one point about market penetration.

However this is really about protecting his digital distribution business aka The iTunes Music Store that also sells HD TV shows and movies for download.

The truth of the matter is if you compare iTunes HD content with Blu Ray content there is a very significant quality gap in Blu Ray’s favour.

Apple should have got on the HD bandwagon and let the consumer decide.

Picture: Some of the Free HD TV content you can download from the US iTunes Music Store.

Lets delve deeper into this whole Apple HD TV content thing.

File Size: If you purchase any HD TV content from the US iTunes store you will also receive the iPod friendly version of the content. In the example below that would consist of a 1.64gb file and a separate 640mb file. A total of 2.2gb per episode. If your chosen show had 24 episodes a season that’s a 54.72gb download in total.

This presents two problems 1) You need to download that. Think bandwidth caps and putting up with slow Internet while it does it. 2) You need to store the content for in theory as long as you want to keep it.

Technical Details:

Video Codec: H.264
Resolution: 1280×720
Total Bitrate: 4439kbps

Video Quality: The 720 HD content looks a whole lot better than the 480 equivalent for sure but is it stunning? No, Don’t get me wrong it’s good, especially on a laptop or PC monitor in a window, but on a large 1080p TV the imperfections of compressed video are evident.

I can be very critical when it comes to video quality. I am sure half the time I am watching blu ray movies I am just looking for flaws in the transfer. So to recap it’s good but not perfect.

Tip: If you have a 1080p display and are distracted by image tear on the top section of the screen, try dropping down your resolution to something closer to the resolution of the video clip.

Audio: Some of the HD content comes with two audio streams  plain old stereo and the other a surround sound version.

Cost: $2.99 is the initial cost per episode but factor in the cost of storing the content and bumping up against any download caps on your Internet connection.

Tip: Download at night its the only way particularly with when you get into the 20 to 50 gig sessions.

Summary

It’s great having essentially an on demand HD content distribution system. The only competition is from from your Satellite or Cable company.

An Argument could be made that future generations will just cherry pick their content instead of buying 400 channels of content they have very little interest in.

So this business model is here to stay. In 5-10 years time it will be funny to re-read this post watching me complaining about file size, download speed and caps.

Yesterdays product announcement went pretty much as expected on the iPod Nano front.

These are sort of cool but I’m much more of an iPod Touch kind of guy. Video on a small screen just becomes annoying after a while.

The updated iPod Touch isn’t enough of an improvement to make me contemplate an upgrade. The additions of a volume control and speaker are nice but it doesn’t really make much odds to me.

The iPod touch is still a marvel to me. Here is what I do with mine:-

Listen to Music
Watch Video
Stream TV from BBC iPlayer
Stream Audio from AOL Radio
Read Twitter and my Gmail Email
Play Games and Apps
Read the New York Times

As well as all the standard things like Maps, Web sites and Pictures. The iPod Touch is more a computer than a Video playing mp3 player. It’s expensive but ultimately worth it.

The good news from yesterday is the Addition of HD TV content in their main store. Prior to this the only HD content available from Apple was locked to the Apple TV infrastructure, and that was movies and not TV.

Now you have the choice to download some TV Shows in 480p ($1.99) or 720p ($2.99).

Much like a drug dealer offering the first hit for free Apple are now offering free downloads of 10  episodes in HD from the likes of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Monk and more to showcase the HD content in the iTunes music store.

When you buy an HD episode you get both the HD and SD versions (one for your TV one for your iPod).

It’s nice to have the choice of quality and price points. But as I have said before paying extra for HD just feels like a tax.

Sadly if you are a UK resident don’t get too excited as none of this HD goodness seems to have filtered through to us.

When you ask customers to pay $99 for an online service it better deliver.

Having to report the loss of 10% of the affected customers e-mail over a multiple day period is frankly both shocking and embarrassing for any large tech company.

I think the only way  Apple can turn this around is to make Mobile Me free for six months. Iron out the bugs then let the consumer decide at the end of the term.

As it stands. Avoid.

Link: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/status/

Dell still remain the overall markets number two player behind HP however their Q2 2008 PC shipments were up an impressive 11.9% and in Q2′08 beat HP.

HP only grew by 5.6% HP however have just refreshed their major product lines so I imagine this will even out in the next couple of quarters.

The new number three player in the PC game in now Apple (See Ya Later, Acer) who managed to ship 38.1% more PC’s in Q2 2008 compared to Q2 2007. So out of the three (HP, Dell and Apple) Apple looks like the rising star.

Ill say it again “If Apple shipped on Windows HP and Dell would have a significant problem on their hands”.

Link: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=724111