iDVD hung out to dry as Apple pushes movies online
One of the original pillars of Apple's iLife suite, iDVD, has increasingly been given the cold shoulder to the point where it is not even depicted on the retail package anymore. How much longer will the app stick around now that the company has focused on pushing media sharing online?
Apple introduced its iDVD authoring software in 2001, originally shipping it only with SuperDrive-equipped Macs as a way to sell users on new DVD burning hardware. While data and files could be burned to DVD as easily as standard CDs, mastering DVD movies that could playback on a standard DVD player required special software for titling and chapter definition as well as transcoding the video into the MPEG-2 format.
Apple didn't want to waste any time entering the new market for DVD authoring, which it saw as a key element in its software-centric, digital hub strategy for differentiating its Mac platform from generic PCs in the late 90s, so it acquired Germany's Astarte, the maker of DVDirector and the original developer of the CD burning app Toast.
