Blockbuster on TiVo, perhaps Apple products

In today's Blockbuster ONDEMAND on TiVo press release, Blockbuster snuck in a little tidbit of information that has the Apple community curious:

"You will see us in a large number of other devices going forward," said Kevin Lewis, senior vice president of digital entertainment at Blockbuster, who added that the company also plans to makes its system available to Apple Inc's products. "We need to be in the normal places that consumers want to watch movies," he said.

Blockbuster on Apple products? On the surface it doesn't make a lot of sense. Apple already has a delivery system for movies and videos. Perhaps you've heard of it, it is called iTunes. For the set top box, they have a hobby called AppleTV. It can pull high definition and regular movies off of the Internet for purchase or rental - just like Blockbuster.

The move would make sense for Blockbuster. With Netflix going on PS3 and XBox and Amazon's movie service on every browser in the world, Blockbuster has a lot of catching up to do.

Why would consumers want another method of downloading the same movie? In a different format? Paid for with a different account?

One reason consumers may favor the Blockbuster offering is because they have over 10,000 titles in their catalog. That is over double of what Apple currently has with iTunes and AppleTV. Also, there might be Blockbuster brick and mortar customers who haven't yet started downloading movies with an Apple product. They would have no incentive to use Apple's catalog.

However, why would Apple want Blockbuster on their products? To sell more hardware? Not likely, Apple doesn't make very much, if any profits on its AppleTV products.

Blockbuster could have been trying to get some cheap publicity by naming Apple when they are only releasing a browser version of the on-demand system, again, just like Amazon and Netflix.

Another question needs to be raised. Why are there so many more tiles in the Blockbuster catalog than the iTunes catalog? Are the movie companies slowing down Apple to help the others stay afloat and therefore continue to have a competitive landscape? Is Apple charging too much to sell a movie? Too little? What's the catch?

In the end, it probably won't matter. The movie companies will have to sell all of their wares through whichever means are available to them at even prices. The winning platform will be the one that shows the best experience. In this regard Apple is certainly standing on solid ground.