iSean

this link (to a PBS op-ed) starts to look at the shift apple is making from IBM chips to Intel over the next 2 years. the thinking here is that the shift has more to do with the potential of Intel beyond just computing:

Another shoe fell recently with the announcement of Intel’s investment in actor Morgan Freeman’s online movie distribution startup, ClickStar. Here is the most important part of that announcement: “The company’s strategy is to provide the marketing and distribution expertise required to enable the release of first-run films before they’re released on DVD and delivered directly to Intel’s digital home entertainment devices.”

What digital home entertainment devices would these be?

I’ve looked and can’t find any. Sure, Intel has plenty of information on its Digital Home web site about digital home entertainment products from its many hardware OEMs, but there is very little you can buy right now under the Intel brand name.

Press releases aren’t written lightly or without nuance. In the ClickStar announcement. Intel was declaring its intention to introduce, presumably in time for Christmas, a family of Intel-branded home entertainment devices. If they had meant devices from Dell or HP, they would have written that.

Now take a look at the ClickStar web site. It isn’t clickstar.com, but clickstarinc.com, which tell us that the name is probably a placeholder. If they really intended to use the trade name “ClickStar,” they would have tied-up the domain prior to the announcement. When the service finally appears, then, it will probably be called something else.

I think it will be called the “iTunes Movie Store.”

i think this is a natural next step. i think apple has their finger on the pulse of pop culture and they are one of the few companies that has shown that they have the infrastructure to handle this sort of a digital lifestyle change. time will tell.

personally, i am more excited about the focus on video and finding ways to get video compressed better and better at a higher quality. i can’t wait to incorporate video into my own teaching. unfortunately, i surveyed students in my two online classes this summer and about 75% of them were still using dial-up. that’s horrible and that doesn’t bode well for any full scale implementations of video for me any time soon. Shucks!