There’s an age-old adage: “you have to walk before you can run”. Computer companies, in the race to be the first to market with “the next big thing”, sometimes forget these sage words of advice. Perhaps that’s how Microsoft recently went from promising the world with Windows Vista and instead ended up delivering a duplex on the corner of Delay and Compromise Streets.

Apple seems to “get it”, at least since the return of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs. Their operating system, Mac OS X, which turned six this week, has been through five incremental updates, each adding functionality and features that make it the gold standard in the industry.

Last week Apple began shipping “Apple TV”, a box that delivers movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, and photos wirelessly from your PC or Mac to your TV (see my review next door). It is the next in Apple’s series of baby steps in the online media marketplace.

There were other personal digital music players and digital jukebox applications before the iPod and iTunes. However, both the players and the software suffered from tortured, inconsistent interfaces, and there was no easy way to buy music online.

When Apple first released iPod and iTunes, they were Mac-only products. After a few months of beta testing by the Mac community (baby steps), Apple released iTunes for Windows. Today the overwhelming majority of iPod users connect to it from a Windows PC. Along with iTunes for Windows came the iTunes Music Store. Buying music online became just a few clicks and a credit card number, and the interface and software just worked.

Well before the “video” iPod came along there were many personal digital video players on the market, but getting good content onto them was a feat requiring more knowledge, computing firepower, and intestinal fortitude than most consumers had the time or inclination for. Learning from their few years of delivering music via the iTunes Music Store, and waiting for wider household adoption of broadband internet connections, Apple eventually began selling TV shows. TV shows (especially those without commercials) are of course much shorter in length, meaning shorter downloading times. More baby steps.

Now, Apple (and a host of other services) offers full-length feature films for download. The Apple TV is the logical next step in getting content from the computer to the TV.

Next time we’ll look at how Apple’s approach could change the entire way we watch TV.