Does Apple’s 1-million Videos Make A Trend?

If you’re looking for a copy of Casablanca to play on your newly purchased iPod with video, keep looking and be patient.

Despite 1-million ‘video’ downloads, the selection remains sparse.

Apple launched the video section of the iTMS with 2,000 music videos, a few TV shows, and some Pixar shorts. And more hype than Microsoft has generated with Windows Vista.

What? You’ve not heard of Windows Vista? See what I mean?

I’m enough of an early adopter that I didn’t hesitate to buy a few videos, a couple of TV episodes, and a few Pixar short movies from iTMS when it launched a few weeks ago.

No, I don’t have an iPod with video. Yet. I stopped at the Apple store this week. They were in stock, black and white. The color screen is beautiful, so I have no doubts it’ll be a bigger seller than the original 5 gig iPod, or the 10 gig, or the iPod photo.

The new iPod is just an iPod that does music, photos, and video playback. It’s just an iPod.

In the few weeks since the iPod with video launched, and Apple updated iTunes to version 6.0 to handle video sales, over 1-million videos have been purchased.

At $1.99 a pop, that’s a couple million dollars to get Apple’s new venture started. So, is there a problem?

Yes. Video selection is thin. Very thin. Ultra thin if one is to consider the number of ‘videos’ that are available in the marketplace. There must be tens of thousands of movies. There must be thousands and thousands of old and current TV shows.

There must be thousands and thousands more music videos available. Even the ones I want I can find on Yahoo but are nowhere to be found on iTunes Music Store.

Apple is right to hype the 1-million videos sold in 20 days. Chances are good that 1-million is about all that Yahoo, Napster, Microsoft, and Real combined sell in music in 20 days.

But it’s not enough, though Apple was quick to point out that iTunes Music Store also have over 2-million songs available from over 1,000 music labels, and 11,000 audiobooks.

I want to believe that movie distributors, music video producers, and TV distributors are standing in line at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA to get their content on iTMS.

After all, the announcement video, though not a major suprise, didn’t come with the usual leaks associated with something so obvious as an iPod that plays video.

I’m convinced that the road to video will be a steady ramp up to success, though, for early adopters, it may seem like a slow liftoff. I’m also convinced that we haven’t seen the ‘whole video picture’ yet?

Why? While at the Apple Store I also had opportunity to dink around with Front Row on a new iMac. Contrary to comparisons, Front Row is abosolutely, positively NOT Microsoft’s Media Center done by Apple.

Front Row is deceptively simple. It’s a ‘front end’ application that provides users with a familiar iPod-like interface to scroll through Movies, Music, DVDs, and Photo slide shows using a simple remote control device. That’s it.

What’s missing is a device to get TV shows, movies, and more music videos into the Mac for storage, and OUT OF THE Mac to your TV set. That’s missing from Apple’s current offerings.

Hmmmm. Macworld 2006 is just two months away.