SAN FRANCISCO — Steve Jobs built a career, a company and, some would say, a cult by picking tomorrow's fight -- a cunning the Apple Computer Inc. chief executive displayed Tuesday as he introduced an online movie service and a fresh crop of iPods.
Anticipating archrival Microsoft Corp.'s plan to unveil its own portable media player this week -- a potential iPod challenger called Zune -- Jobs again shifted the battlefield by showing off a device he called the missing piece that will fuse television and the Internet.
Eschewing his customary black turtleneck for a black button-down shirt, Jobs said Apple planned to introduce the device, tentatively dubbed iTV, early next year, just as Microsoft hopes to start building a market for Zune.
Making TVs and personal computers work together better is seen as the key step toward the broad online distribution of movies and television shows. The Internet is already disrupting Hollywood's traditional business models as audiences migrate online. Apple, for instance, has sold 45 million video downloads since late last year.
But the transition has been slowed by the lack of a standard, easy-to-use way to display the countless choices of the Internet on the most popular screen in the house. People want to watch movies on their living room TV, not on their office PC or the tiny screen of a portable device.
"This is the missing piece. Here it is," Jobs said, holding aloft an aluminum machine roughly the size of a 1-pound box of chocolates. "It's going to let you enjoy your media on your big-screen flat TV."
Rarely does Jobs provide glimpses of Apple's pipeline. Tuesday's peek may signal that despite Apple's dominance of the portable entertainment market, it can ill afford to divert its attention from Microsoft.
Can Apple and its boss pick the next fight or will the Microsoft juggernaut overtake them the way it did a generation ago with Windows?
Analysts remain skeptical that Microsoft initially will grab anything more than the sliver of the portable player market not already claimed by Apple. They note that the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is entering a market Apple dominates with 88% of legal music downloads.
"They're certainly playing catch-up. They are coming to the market this fall basically in the same place that Apple was five years ago," said analyst Van Baker of technology consulting firm Gartner Inc. "Could they do a good job with it? Yeah. Could they do some damage to Apple? Unlikely."
