Two wildly unchecked egos, two major announcements, two further inroads towards a world where all media flows from the same gilded spigot: Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey opened their billion-dollar yaps today to make statements about the expansion of their respective empires, and all you proles should probably go ahead and quake accordingly. On your knees:
– At his annual MacWorld appearance, Jobs broke out his favorite black turtleneck to unveil the new super-slim MacBook Air, which is the first model to eschew a CD/DVD drive completely—something Jobs says consumers "won't miss because they can download movies and music over the Internet." Accordingly, Jobs announced plans for Apple to enter the online movie rental business, revealing he'd reached a deal with all six major movie studios to offer downloadable films within 30 days after they're released on DVD. This, along with the Netflix set-top box reported on earlier, appears to be yet another nail in the coffin for traditional video stores, God bless 'em.
– While hardly as game-changing, Oprah Winfrey had news of her own expansion [pause for cheap laughter] into her very first eponymous cable network: OWN, or The Oprah Winfrey Network, is scheduled to debut in nearly 70 million homes next year. Winfrey ominously intoned, "This is an evolution of what I've been able to do every day…I will now have the opportunity to do this 24 hours a day on a platform that goes on forever." (She then loosened her velour pants for a hearty, 30-second cackle.) No word yet on what sort of programming OWN will carry, but if we owned the syndication rights to Girlfriends we'd probably be celebrating.