Armed with little more than the iPod and tunes downsized into the meekest of digital audio files, Apple overthrew the music distribution industry.
Now, somewhat shakily, it is moving into the newest online frontier - sales and rentals of high-definition movies.
Since late last month, Apple has been selling HD downloads to any computer user running iTunes 8.1.
Apple's latest move obviously is not another venture into portability, even though HD movie purchases at iTunes also include a standard-definition version compressed sufficiently for an iPod.
No, now that Apple is in your pocket, it wants into your home.
So I invited it into my den.
I waited in-line, electronically, until premiere day last month for Quantum of Solace, then waited (and waited) for the latest Bond instalment to land (via broadband) in my MacBook.
It took about 90 minutes, or about 15 minutes less than the movie's run time.
Solace also consumed close to 5 gigabytes on my hard drive, almost 3 gigabytes for the HD version that included high-resolution video (1280x544) and a Dolby Digital soundtrack.
The hallmarks of iTunes' music success, economy of time and space, were gone already.
But does that matter?The download time, considering the sheer size of an HD file, did not bother me.
Nor did the space it consumed.
I stored Solace on a 1-terabyte external hard drive (that's 1000 gigabytes) that cost about $NZ200.
For many people, though, it will matter.
About 250 iTunes songs fit on 1 gigabyte.
In music currency, Solace is almost 900 songs.
The HD downloads, at $NZ17.99 (or $NZ6.99 for rentals), are priced somewhere between a DVD and a hi-def blu-ray disc.
Most people probably have not connected a computer to an HDTV.
It is a bit more complicated than the familiar DVD player.
I used two adapters with my MacBook: one that changed the video feed from the laptop's Mini DisplayPort to an HDMI jack and another for the digital mini-optical audio that allowed me to use a standard digital audio cable.
Then I had to set up the MacBook's video to the proper resolution and put it in "mirror" mode so that what appeared on the laptop's screen would also appear on my 42-inch plasma HDTV.
Was it worth it? Considering the time, money, effort and picture quality, no.
Even at the bigger file sizes, iTunes HD still is not quite blu-ray quality because Apple must use enough compression so the file will download in less than two hours over a broadband connection.
Yet I doubt many people could tell the difference between this HD Solace and the blu-ray Solace I set-up next to it.
The downloaded version had slightly richer colour and less digital "noise", or artefacts.
No-one doubts that on-demand, digital distribution is the future.
The question is where it will come from: cable, satellite, internet or your telephone company? Or will it be: wherever you want to get it?Here is the difference.
People don't care if the music they download from iTunes is not a perfect match for a CD because it does not matter on an iPod.
When those same people download video to watch on an HDTV, though, they will value HD quality as much as convenience. -Kevin Hunt, The Hartford Courant
