While Australians cannot access the movie content they will soon according to Apple executives. But for Apple this is a mere hiccup with the Company set to rake in millions from music. Even the emergence of the new Zune from Microsoft will drive business to Apple as consumers weigh up whether to buy a Zune or a brand new iPod.

This month is the time of year when Steve Jobs, Apple Computer's Mr Incredible, tells the world what electronic toys we are going to want in our Christmas stockings.
Thanks to the runaway success of the iPod music player, which has racked up 60m sales, Job's autumn unveiling of Apple's latest products has become hugely important for retailers and consumers alike.

 Apple's inspirational founder and chief executive rarely disappoints. Two years ago, there was the iPod mini and the iMac, which "hid" the computer behind its screen. Last year there was the first video iPod and the stunning iPod Nano, thinner than a pencil and the fastest-selling model to date. In different ways, each of these products redefined consumers' expectations of what was possible.

This year, Apple was expected to build on its commanding position in digital music by adding movies to the iTunes online store — allowing people to download full-length films, and then transfer them from their computer to their iPod.

The huge popularity of the YouTube website has already demonstrated the appetite for even amateurish video. With more people switching to fast broadband internet connections, much of the entertainment industry is preparing to embrace the digital revolution.

In San Francisco last week, Jobs confirmed plans to sell movies from iTunes. However, Apple's initial movie offering was the bare minimum that industry rivals had expected. iTunes will at first sell only 75 films, all from studios owned by Walt Disney, including Pixar, Miramax and Touchstone. For the moment, the service is restricted to America.

Compare that with Amazon, the online books and DVD retailer, which 10 days ago launched its own movie-downloading service. Amazon Unbox is offering "thousands" of films and television shows, having reached agreements with many top studios.

Amazon said its studio partners were responsible for two-thirds of all movie releases. In fact, the only major omission is Walt Disney Pictures and its sister studios.

One might imagine that this line-up — Disney with Apple, the rest with Amazon — has something to do with the fact that Jobs is a director of Walt Disney and also the company's biggest shareholder, having sold his Pixar animated films business to the group last year for $7.4 billion (£3.9 billion).

Not so, according to Jobs. "It's really nothing to do with me being on the board," he told The Wall Street Journal.

Apple will still be selling many popular films, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Pixar hits such as Cars, Toy Story and The Incredible. But the pricing on iTunes does not look particularly compelling — $14.99 for new releases and $9.99 for older films. Critics said this was not significantly cheaper than buying a film on DVD. Moreover, DVDs are often sold with additional interview and other material, and can easily be lent to a friend.

In contrast, Apple's copyright restrictions will prevent users "burning" their movie purchases to a disk. And, at least for another few months, iTunes customers will not be able to watch their films on proper televisions — they will have to make do with seeing them on their computers or, worse, on the tiny screen of their iPods.

So, Apple's much-heralded attempt to take digital media to Hollywood amounts to this: a limited choice of films, sold in a less convenient and more restrictive format, at a price that is not markedly better than the existing alternative.

To many, this seems a very long way from the breakthrough that iTunes represented when the online store was launched three years ago.

"It was interesting to see how many more studios Amazon had signed up than Apple," said an industry rival. "Apple really only got Disney. I thought that was very strange. I also was unimpressed they announced it with only 75 films."

The movie store's humble beginning may explain why the presentation that Jobs gave last week failed to live up to his deserved reputation as a brilliant evangelist for his company's products.

Speaking more quickly than usual, Jobs ran through a long list of mostly modest enhancements to the iPod range and to the iTunes software. The iPod has been given a brighter screen, longer battery life, better headphones and new scrolling software. The Nano has been redesigned to make it even slimmer, and is now available in a range of five colours, including an 8Gb black version capable of holding 2,000 songs. iTunes has also been refreshed to improve the organisation of music and other libraries (for movies, pod casts, etc), and to enable users to choose songs by album cover.

With the possible exception of the new iPod Shuffle — the world's smallest digital music player, designed to be clipped to clothing rather than carried — few of these innovations merited the familiar superlatives that Jobs heaped upon them. From the sound of his low-key performance, he didn't entirely believe it himself.

The lack of "beef" in many of last week's announcements may also help to explain why Jobs chose to break one of his golden rules: never to talk about future products.

Ordinarily, Apple adheres to this policy with a rigour that is virtually unmatched, certainly within the technology industry. In the past, this has enabled the company to retain the element of surprise that has served it so well in its marketing.

Paul Durman of the Sunday Times contributed to this story.