Apple TV’s Competition

The Apple TV, launched to the public on the 21st of March, 2007, is Apple's view of a digital media receiver - a network device running Mac OS X and designed to play online digital content from YouTube, iTunes Store, or even another computer on the network. The resulting images are displayed using an enhanced-definition or a high-definition widescreen TV, and video footage can be easily stored on the internal hard drive, as well as streamed across the network to another computer running iTunes on Mac OS X or Windows. Well, it seems that after all this time, now the Apple TV is going to have a direct competitor, a device from the movie rental house Blockbuster!


In the last years, Blockbuster's fame and fortune started to fade, and now Reuters reports they are developing a set-top device for streaming movies directly to TV sets. "If you can't rent'em, steam'em!" Sounds good to me, although there are no official comments about this rumored product. After all, the rumor says "the device device is believed to be a stand-alone product akin to Apple TV as opposed to embedding a Blockbuster-branded service in such existing devices as Microsoft's Xbox 360 or TiVo," and nothing more.

Anyway, since Blockbuster spent $6.6 million last year to buy Movielink, a service for rental, download, and watching video content on computers, the next logical step is to create a device only for this task, just like the Apple TV.

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