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No Video iPod Coming?
Fuzzball963 writes "ThinkSecret is reporting that a video iPod is not going to be released on Oct.12th. Instead, the announcement will be an 80 GB update to the iPod, along with size improvements on the color models. The analysts seem to say that the video iPod is in development, but that lack of a licensing agreement between Apple and the studios has made it a no-go for now." From the article: "While a video-capable iPod remains in development, without the agreements nor infrastructure in place to deliver movies to customers through a store-like interface, Apple sees little value in releasing such an iPod at this time. Apple insiders have also said executives see consumers needing the capability to easily import the DVD movies they own to a usable format (similar to the encoding functionality provided for audio CDs with iTunes) in order for a video iPod to be truly successful. The complexity to date of accomplishing such a feat has meant only a minority of computer users have dabbled with watching full-length movies on their computer, with most of those having acquired the content through file sharing services."
Makes sense when they explain it but really if we all just wait a few days there will be no speculation =p
Last time I checked, iTunes Music Store had music videos. Put the video iPod on the market, let the movie folks see the potential just in music videos.
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Home-made movies?
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So, I think the lack of a Video iPod is no great loss. What Apple are missing out on is a decent iPod-style phone. According to The Register, the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone isn't shifting in any significant quantity. Perhaps if Apple and Motorola had come up with something more like the (admittedly flawed) Bang & Olufsen Serene then it would be a real seller. That's the kind of unified gadget there's a market for.. a good mobile/music player hybrid. B&O showed that it's possible. But Apple have either missed the boat on this one, or perhaps they do have something in development in-house.
Really though.. if I want to watch a film while I'm away.. I stick a DVD in my laptop. That has a nice big screen and I've never run into DRM issues with that. Yet.
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Granted, it is not as easy as ripping a CD, but if anyone can streamline this into a single-step process(to the end-user anyway), it would be Apple.
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Thank god they didn't decide to go the route of Sony with a special format (such as UMD) that can only be played on a tiny machine. It's just a cash-cow for sony, and I hope that it doesn't work (I'd hate to see yet another competing video format, one that isn't even for the main television, it would be like getting movies on gameboy cartridges).
It's going to be a VIDEO iPod. Did anyone notice that free music videos on iTMS, which used to be updated lots haven't since June? Perhaps apple isn't giving them away because they want to sell them now!
I very much doubt they will launch with movies. If they do it will be limited. They will simply market it as an added extra similar to album art on the color iPods.
The complexity to date of accomplishing such a feat has meant only a minority of computer users have dabbled with watching full-length movies on their computer, with most of those having acquired the content through file sharing services."
Yes, putting in a DVD and have it autostart is really complex, and prevents me from "watching full-length movies on [my] computer". My friend has a flashy new phone capable of playing video, it has a tool for ripping DVDs which is equally simple. I don't see myself getting a video iPod though, I've never missed having something like that.
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Music videos will be Apples foot in the door for any iTMS style movie distribution. But cinematic movies are a lot longer off simply owing to the fact that the customer base (that has the required bandwidth) is still a small market.
That, and no-one wants to watch a movie on a shitty little screen.
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If it can be connected to any TV.
I mean imagine, you could go visit a friend, and bring your movie/porn collection...
Its called the iPod-Linux. If you install Linux on your iPod Photo, it will play video. It takes 24 bit uncompressed AVI files and splits up the sound. It takes each frame separately and stores it as a slideshow. Next, it goes to the slideshow and accelerates the frames to 30 frames a second while playing audio in the background. Voila! Although the screen is small, no screen is too small for the Boondock Saints.
Jobs has said time and time again that he thinks the idea of a video iPod is stupid and doesn't want to make one. And yet, Slashdot keeps acting like it will be a reality. He even went so far as to mock companies that were pursuing portable video.
I've actually posted a comment similar to this a year ago. Here is the Apple Special Event 04. 12:35 into the video.
It comes with every new Apple computer.
"Did Apple suddenly create a magical algorithm that cut the size of a 30 minute show to less than a gigabyte, even if only at 320 x 320 resolution?"
Well, they didn't INVENT Mpeg-4....
I have a nokia 6230. This is a regular joe - standard nokia candy bar form factor series 40 - phone. Its not a smart phone / mobile computer / email executive toy. This is a phone marketed to kids / fashion crowd. An updated version is already in the shops marketed as free with a 12 month contract (i.e. in j6p's eyes this is a completely free phone).
.3gp video format which is just a rebadged cutting-edge highdef format repurposed for embedded devices. really gets amazing small file sizes, with acceptable picture.
... You can download the j2me toolkit from sun and write your own programs/games for free. There is open source community around j2me for instance I use j2meVNC for remote desktop access which is useable if not a pleasure. All this rolled into one device Yes it sucks at almost all its 2ndary roles - but then it is virtually FREE!
now using just dvd-decryptor and the software (transcoder) that comes with the phone you can copy a complete dvd-film to the memory card. a film takes up about 100MB. I have a 1GB of cf memory. I generally carry a couple of films and several mp3/aac albums everywhere i go.
Cons:
1. The screen is low resulution so the quality is pretty bad.
2. have to break the drm on the dvd. No legal way to get mainstream content.
3. nokias pc software sucks. Its really really bad - can't stress that enough. If it was even 60% as good as itunes interface i'd be happy.
4. syncs over bluetooth, not fast enough for me, but newer faster bluetooth versions are already here.
Pros.
1. uses
2. Can share music/videos with other peoples phones with a few button presses - all don over bluetooth. No drm thankyou very much.
3. Phone has a built in speaker so several people can watch (squint at) the film.
This phone is a gameboy,video player, ipod,crackberry,phone,pager, calendar,internet browser,wap browser
So for me all apple would be bringing to party is a slick interface, some nasty DRM, and a big fat price tag. It might sell but only because j6p doesn't know how good his 6320 could be.
Apple had better release the iphone in the next couple of years or they're spent.Nokia, sony and microsoft will eat them for breakfast.
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Obviously, ThinkSecret is wrong.
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I guess 99 cents per movie wasn't enough for those greedy Hollywood studios.
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So, while I may not have a huge collection, I do have a reasonably large one and at high bit rates (192+ VBR) they tend to take up some room.
Plus, my iPod has a few essential data files on it (such as the code to manage the iPod written in Perl) and some pictures of the family.
The most fundamental reason is that it sucks to watch movies on a 3" or smaller screen. The beauty of sound is that the size of the generator doesn't matter (much - audiophiles will point out the lack of base, clipping/overshooting on square wave tests, etc.); this is just not true of visuals. The only way around this is if someone can put a 3" screen 3" from your eyeballs (to get the same angular coverage as a movie or TV screen) and hold it there, comfortably.
iGlasses, anyone?
If you are storing your music collection as MP3s, then 80MB is a lot. On the other hand if you store your music collection is FLAC or ALE (Apple Lossless Encoding), then the extra storage space is useful.
The question really to be asking is whether people are actually using the larger iPods in the same manner as the smaller iPods. For example are they using it for photos, personal data, movies (even if they can't be player) and other large files.
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Yes... The iPod nano sales are so lackluster that Apple can't even keep the 4gig versions in stock. Please actually look up information before you invent it.
I have no idea what will be announced at this event, but I think it's safe to assume that Thinksecret's assertion that Apple will simply announce modest updates to it's iPod, Powerbook and Power Mac product lines is highly unlikely. Apple only orchestrates these types of highly-publicized events when they are introducing a brand new or substantially different product.
I just can't see Jobs deliberately getting the media buzz going with his cryptic little invitation and then getting on stage and saying "look, here's our new 80 GB iPod and our dual-core Power Mac...oh, and one more thing...our Powerbooks have higher resolution screens".
Something new will be announced. I'd bet against a video iPod, but this event is most assuredly not for announcing product updates.
No, of course not, we didn't invent this story. There really is a Video iPod in development. Don't listen to Jobs, he's trying to cover it up.
And no, this isn't bait and switch. We aren't switching to a more likely story to make it seem that we are guessing right. It is not as if we had a history of fabulation.
Yeah, right.
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I doubt music videos have that great of a market either, considering not even MTV plays them anymore. I suspect the best candidate for this would be recorded TV shows, small enough in size that they can be easily stored on a hard drive player, short enough in length that they can watched casually, and you usually don't have the focus on visual effects (which, as you mention, will be less than impressive on a tiny screen).
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Forget feature movies for now. The obvious first step is to start off small and infectious. Watch Apple announce an integration with Google Video. There was an iTunes/Google rumour or hint going around. Video Podcasts, Viral videos, home-made clips, free shorts and portfolio clips The Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa, Leeeroy Let the first Video iPod trade in that content to get the ball rolling. This is a great way to test the water, check the popularity, security, and potential business models for video. Experiment with selling music videos at first, then after all that go for feature movies.
You can rip a DVD using Apple's Disk Utility program. What you get is disk image, suitable for burning if you have big enough blanks, or playing using DVD Player by mounting the image. Sure, it isn't a small file, but an 80 GB iPod could hold several. The problem is when you want to encode that into a different format.
Hello The Daily Show, this will be the first TV show get regular distribution in a Podcast-type manner.
It has got to be bigger than minor upgrades to the current iPods. The invitations to this event seemed to suggest something big: "One more thing..." and if that one more thing is just a hard drive upgrade to the iPods than a lot of journalists are going to be mad that they made the trip out to california. By calling media events like this, Steve Jobs spends a lot of his social capital, the press is willing to come because they expect something awesome. If he dissapoints, he will be limited in his ability to do this in the future. I do not think he will disappoint. These upgraded iPods he may announce, yes, but there will be something bigger, it may not be an iPod, but it will be something cool. - Geddes
Jobs has said time and time again that he thinks the idea of a video iPod is stupid
Just like he and the other Apple drones spent a year or so dissing the expensive, high-end Flash players before introducing the ipod mini? I recall hearing quite a lot of apple fans parroting Apple's talking points: flash players suck, the capacity is tiny, everyone wants 60GB, and so on. On stage during the mini inro, he even spent an abnormal amount of time dissing existing Flash players. And today what is Apple's current ipod de jour? The Nano - a high-end, expensive Flash player. In fact, Apple even ditched its hard disk mini player in favour of a flash player.
Don't believe everything you hear. The only reason Apple is currently "down" on video is because it hasn't figured out to make a killing from it. Note that the desires of pod owners don't enter into it. It would be trivial to movie-enable colour ipods with a firmware update. But since Apple hasn't figured out how to *sell* movie content it sees no point giving people extra features. In the end, it's not about the ipod as an enabling device for personal media consumption and remixing but its positioning as a channel for Apple monetize.
I prefer my media devices DRM-free, thanks.
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Think of it as a bonus for people doing video production. I'm not talking about playing video on an iPod, but rather people who want to carry video data from one place to another.
Networking geeks have an old saying: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." It takes a little more than three minutes to send a gigabyte of data through a T3, assuming ideal transfer conditions. By that standard, 80GB would take 240 minutes, or six hours. If we assume an average walking rate of 4mph for the average person, a pair of sneakers and an 80gig iPod would have better bandwidth than a T3 out to a range of about 20 miles, including the time necessary to load and unload the data via FireWire (@ 100MB/sec).
Video people already like FireWire. Apple won a Clio for it a few years ago, because it gave video production companies a way to move large chunks of data around easily. Directors have come to love the idea that they can buy a Powerbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro for about the price of one day's postprocessing fees, and have immediate feedback to what they're shooting.
For those people, the iPod is an inexpensive, ultra-portable data storage module. You could fill a briefcase with the things for a few thousand dollars and have more than enough space to carry the raw footage for an entire movie around with you.
The same general idea works for photographers and musicians. It's easy to accumulate 80 gigs of high-quality, first-pass data when you're in the content creation business, and an iPod gives you a convenient way to stick all that information into your pocket and carry it wherever you need to go.
Apple already knows that the sweet spot for actual music storage is about 5 gigs. They have a whole line of products for people who just want a straightforward music player. The higher-capacity models are for people who want to carry data.
Ummm... they have hd+color now, and get 15 hours. Mostly by running the drive and loading a bunch of music into RAM, then shutting the drive down while they play from RAM. No reason the same trick couldn't be played with video.
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Here's something I've been wondering the last week. In the flurry of HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray bickering in the press, "managed copy" keeps coming up. To make a managed copy of an HD-DVD, a computer rips it, strips off the AACS DRM, and wraps on a new DRM layer (MS will use Windows Media DRM, of course, and you'd expect other companies to use their own DRM layers). This is all legal and approved. So the studios will let us rip HD-DVDs (with conditions), and the studios believe that HD is much more valuable than SD. So why can't the computer industry convince the DVD CCA to amend their rules to allow managed copy for regular DVDs?
I looked at the comments of this article specifically to see if anyone mentioned HandBrake. It makes it super, super easy to record DVDs into H.264 format, which looks amazing. Of course, it does take for friggin' ever. It took like 20 hours to encode a movie to H.264 on my 1.33 GHz PowerBook (if I remember correctly). I can't wait for my family to get an iMac or something to make it faster. Hell, it might even be worth it just to get a Mac mini to use as a dedicated ripping machine, as to not type up your main computer.
But if you're just using an iPod for storage it makes much more sense to just buy protable hard drives
Then it goes full circle... You can't play music on portable hard drives.
No one said this is either-or. I partition mine for twenty gigs of music, forty for files, and I'm able to carry around a full backup of every important project I'm working on.
Size -- other poratables are too big.
Weight -- they also also too heavy.
Content -- there is no content to put on it. Copyright issues are everywhere!
Output screens -- they are simply too small for video.
So how could that change?
If the iPod could be made to do video playback without getting bigger or heavier, there was a source for content, and you had some kind of output, you bet he'd do it.
For output, the 12" PB shows you how it could be done -- a simple mini-DVI slot would do it. Or you could use the existing iPod photo video out.
For size, well, that's where technology will help. The playback could be done probably within a year or two. Even now, the technology could certainly fit into the relatively bulky iPod form factor (for a price).
The content is probably the stickler. iTunes rips CDs, but could it rip DVDs? What about importing other movies you download? There are no online download services.. I suppose it could sync with iMovie like it syncs with iPhoto, but obviously Apple would like to have a real content download medium. No longer would you pay 60-100$ for a season of TV on DVD; instead, you could get it downloaded for 20$. That'd be worth it.
I doubt the media producers are cooperating.
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Then why exactly would one buy a $350 (or something) iPod 80GB instead of a $130 external 300gig harddisk with Firewire? You could even get the $130 hard disk AND the what, $200, iPod Nano, and get more capacity to carry files, still enough for your music, AND save money.
What gives?
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