Contributed by Kelly McNeill | osViews This article was syndicated under osViews' Open Content License. January 19, 2005 9:18 AM

There is something that has apparently slipped by all of us that watched Apple Computer's Mac World Expo Keynote Speech, which gives us some clues regarding Apple's direction in the home video market. Steve Jobs invited the president of Sony, Kunitake Ando to speak about the two company's collaboration--as Steve Jobs put it--to "make this the year of high definition video."

I believe that the partnership is more involved than Sony's pro-sumer HD video camera being able to work with Apple's iMovie...(now that the software is capable of editing high-definition video.) Don't get me wrong, iMovie's new HD capability is an extremely compelling feature, but even something like that, doesn't warrant a visit from the president of one of the largest electronics manufactures like Sony.

Throughout his keynote speech, Steve Jobs made it a point to sing the praises of a new high-compression/high-quality video codec named H.264/AVC. This codec is extremely scalable, and delivers excellent quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum -- from high definition television to video conferencing and 3G mobile multimedia.

As shown in a preview at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in April, video using H.264, encoded at full high definition resolution (1920x1080 24p) was played back between 6.8 and 8 Mbps at full HD quality while managing to cut the file size of the previous high resolution video standard (MPEG-2), in half. This can't be understated. H.264 changes everything you think you know about digital video.

These days, everybody is talking about when Apple will release an iTunes Movie store. Whenever somebody mentions it however, the immediate response from the peanut gallery is that quality would inevitably suffer to accommodate bandwidth restrictions. Assuming you're not downloading the movie but instead streaming it from Apple's servers, even with a broadband connection, a download at standard MPEG2 compression would be pretty intense, even so at 640x480 24p quality.

But with H.264, what was previously impossible, is now not only possible but inevitable. It really is only a matter of time before we can expect to see digital movies being streamed to our computers and TVs in crisp, high-definition video. It's not a question of "how" anymore but one of "who," "who's first" and "how quickly."

Sony's involvement with Apple on this endeavor would come in two parts. First, it was less than a year ago that it was reported that Steve Jobs went to Sony's President, Kunitake Ando and asked if his company would be interested in being a licensee of Apple's Digital Rights Management for their (then) soon to be announced Walkman digital music player. Though it has been suggested that the potential partnership was discussed to ward off the threat which was Microsoft and its DRM partners, one can only assume that Apple was also a bit timid at the thought that they would be competing against the creators of "The Walkman." (Cue scarry organ music here.)

Sony, being very much like Apple, believed they should take this project alone so that they could lead the digital music revolution and control it the way Apple is doing now. After Sony's president turned down Steve's DRM offer, the Walkman eventually debuted to lackluster reviews and turned out to be yet another shining example in a long list of would-be iPod/iTMS killers that never materialized. I have to wonder if Kunitake Ando went back to Apple a few months after the Walkman's debut and asked Steve if he might reconsider restating his offer.

With Sony no longer a threat, I imagine that Steve would have totally shrugged off any further negotiations with the company if he didn't know that they had him by the balls with regard to digital movies. In the same way that Apple had to woo the major record labels to make their music available on the iTunes music store for it to succeed, Apple has to do the same with major movie distributors, of which Sony happens to be.

Like all the other movie distributors, Sony would have to be made privy to some of the most intricate details of Apple's movie store. Without a special collaboration between the two companies, Apple would be tipping off the one movie distribution company which also happens to be a computer and consumer electronics company. To suggest that a partnership was inevitable is an understatement.

Apple would probably create the software to interface with the movie store and both companies could sell the hardware to interface with it. This hardware would need only be relatively basic, it wouldn't require an exceptionally fast processor nor would it require much RAM. While Sony hasn't announced any hardware to accommodate this spec in the recent past, I think we saw Apple's at Mac World and didn't even realize it. It's called, "Mac mini."

When the Mac mini is released next week, I wonder how much longer (if at all) we'll have to wait to see Apple's movie store finally materialize.