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Video iPod Apple's First Bad Move?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has had a lot of success with the iPod brand the past few years. The NYT has an article up wondering if, just maybe, this week's release of the video iPod was too soon." From the article: "Everyone from Microsoft to Comcast - in other words, the usual suspects - is working on or looking at similar pocket-size recorders. At least two companies, Pace Micro Technology of Britain and Samsung of South Korea, have said they plan to introduce models early next year. There is also TivoToGo, a service that can forward recorded shows to various mobile devices, even Sony PSP handheld gaming units ... [anyway,] the video iPod only has it half right: if it took material from the television as readily as it did from the Internet, it could be a blockbuster. But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free? Unlike its musical forebear, the video iPod may not be ready for prime time. "
Mr. Siklos seems to miss the point, and the details. Apple substantially downplayed the video capability of the iPod, and the audience reaction was understandably lukewarm considering the limited selection and quality of available content.
As for the details: There already is a "bogeyman" of online video: BitTorrent. Hell, it's the bogeyman of online everything, depending on who you ask. It's no centralized Napster, but that's mostly due to the lessons learned from Napster.
There are TV tuners for computers available. How long until it's seamless to drop content from your PVR software into your iTunes Library and onto your iPod? I noticed I can't drag just any video into my iTunes Library, but I haven't played enough to really see about adding my own video.
Trying to wedge PVR functionality into the portable device is overkill. It's a player. Let the computer do the work... that's why it's there.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
"Video iPod Apple's First Bad Move? Unlike its musical forebear, the video iPod may not be ready for prime time. "
First, the ipod was not ready for prime time when it first appeared and yet look at what Apple has accomplished. When the 1st ipod came out in 2001 there was no itunes music store, no cottage industry of ipod accessories, no support for PCs and no cult of ipod. The only way to get music on your ipod was to rip cds yourself or download mp3s and get access to a Mac.
Now it's 2005 and the ipod is firmly entrenched in the American psyche and it is easy to get audio onto an ipod but difficult to get video on it unless you rip dvds or download optimized movie files yourself. The situation is hardly any different.
Second, Apple is not selling a Video-ipod or vpod or anything else that emphasizes video. Apple's selling ipods, some of which have video playback capabilities. These other companies are trying to sell hardware that may have no real market.
http://nyamenation.org/
People who spend $400 plus accessories and bitch about spending $2 on a missed episode can shampoo my crotch.
$.99 for a song, 4-5 minutes. $1.99 for a TV show for 40 minutes.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
"But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?"
and why would a person download from iTunes when free P2P networks exist?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
You're a couple decades too late, see the Apple III or the Apple Lisa.
Besides, hardcore geeks that want to watch TV on the go already know how to capture stuff and view it on PDAs. I do it all the time, and it's in 640x480 from an HD source.
And why do people pay $1.99 for a ring tone that lasts 30 seconds? As expensive as $2 sounds for a TV episode sounds, you can never underestimate the wastefulness of the consumer. I don't think Apple will find any problems making money off of selling videos, as long as they have reasonable co-operation from networks, and provide enough free content themselves, someone out there will spend the money.
My take on all of this is that people still want an iPod. If they want bigger than a 4 GB player to store their music, then they will go with a full-size iPod. Before, you got 20 GB or 60 GB and no video. Now, for the same price, you get 30 or 60 GB AND video. You pay the same price and you get more features. I agree with people who say "Who will use video on the iPod?" But when you realize that the iPod is a music player FIRST and a video player is an added bonus, it makes more sense. If you want a high capacity music player, then you want an iPod - everyone wants an iPod; they're cool. But then the video playing is just an added bonus. If you want a high capacity video player, then you'd get something else.
One of the reason itunes has caught up because it is legal and I don't have to worry about RIAA knocking on my door. $1.99 is not too much for the shows I really like. Still better than buying the >$20 DVDs later. (yes I will be missing the special features etc) but $1.99 is still cheap.
>|<*:=
Apple's first bad move was not making the Mac a commodity item. That leaves the PC with all the apps and all the possibilities. The presumed benfits of iron-fisted control by Apple seem not to be real benefits. MS got the chance to make their desktops good enough combined with having all the apps/games. While Mac remain a niche computer.
If the download was fast and I'd missed my favorite show, I might pay $1.99 to see it. It's true that the shows are also likely to be on BitTorrent, but that has legal issues, and the download might not be reliable. For people who don't watch much TV, the occasional $1.99 would work out cheaper than buying a TiVO and a subscription.
I assume you'll be able to watch it on a PC or a TV, not just a tiny iPod screen.
Mark Cuban seems to think that's the important part of the video iPod. As do others.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Everyone is quick to attack the leader. Granted it might be too soon, but thats what always has made Apple successful. Yes, there will be other devices that can do video, probably even better than this device (Archos and Cowon make devices like this already).
But they are doing something different. They are creating a market for paying for video content via the Internet. I for one am interested--I don't pay for Cable and getting a decent version of a TV show for $1.99 is a good deal to me. I don't have an iPod, but might I get one once I buy a few episodes? Sure.
Apple is the leader of the pack. Just because they jumped in first doens't mean its too soon. Sould we wait until MS finally realizes its a good idea (late 2006, probably) for such content? No.
I'm not an Apple apologist (or even really a fan), but the one thing that sticks out about Apple's take on this is simplicity.
First, I still know people who have trouble hooking up their own VCRs (and to a lesser extent, DVD players), not to mention programming them. Hooking up a device to a TV to record a show would probably make their heads explode. Setting up the timing just right on a Tivo-like device would also be a daunting task to some.
And second, if programming the device to record a show is too much, you could just sit there and hit 'record' as soon as the show comes on, and 'stop' when it ends, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having a Tivo-like device. Why would these people want to do that when they can pay $1.99 or whatever at any time to get the show they missed the night before?
I think Apple made a good move with the Video iPod. That said, however, I think their initial offering of shows on the iTunes store is pretty pathetic. They should have launched with a slightly larger variety.
The video iPod is getting all of the attention, but that's not the whole story.
Apple is moving into the living room. That means video, and Apple is getting started with a three-pronged strategy:
* Front Row
* iTunes Video Store
* iPod with video
It would not make sense for Apple to make the move into video and leave the video iPod out of it.
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
How many students subscribe to cable when they're away at college?
Similar devices from other manufacturers will be released NEXT YEAR. Getting your product to the market first is a good thing, not a slip up. Somebody is just an apple hater.
How ya like dat?
everybodys already fogotten the IIgs, the Lisa, the newton, the hockey-puck mouse? that god-awful mouse that shipped with the g4 towers?
This is just another in a long line of bad moves by apple, not their first, or last. I personally find it more surprising when they make a GOOD move.
....sums it up quite nicely
"And there are chewy, unresolved legal questions raised by gadgets like the PocketDISH or Slingbox" ipod is too much of a cash cow for apple to risk lawsuits. Do you think that the MPAA will sit around doing nothing if Apple introduced an ipod capable of recording movies ? Downloading video content from itunes is above the board, legal and safe (from apple's standpoint). And this is not the last ipod that apple is ever going to introduce. How about Mac mini --> Front row --> Sync recorded shows to video ipod ? They have the mini, they have front row, they have video ipod, the next step is too easy. Trust me, this take it slow approach is not because of lack of vision.
is not releasing higher def content. I realize that putting higher def content on the video iPod which cannot display it is dumb, but Apple already solved the "differenet resolutions for different devices" problem with the iPod photo. Obviously it would be pointless to put your 5 megapixel pictures on the iPod photo which cannot display it, it would waste space and more importantly, it would waste power because you have to spin the hard drive more just to load data that you will end up not really even using anyway. But at the same time you want to keep all those 5 megapixel pictures on your computer where you can use that kind of resolution. How did Apple solve the problem? Simple, when you first set up your iPod photo for pictures, iTunes automatically converts your photo library into a size that is usable on your iPod. Not the quickest of processes, but if you let it run in the background it shouldn't matter. I don't understand why they couldn't do this with the video content either. I bought a music video just to see what it would look like, and while it wasn't HORRIBLE I can find better looking content through other sources...
Monstar L
At the school that I go to, many people have iPods. It's not too uncommon to hear of someone being mugged for their ipods. If this happened often when an ipod would be mostly kept in a bag or pocket and the only indication would have been the headphones, imagine how the problem would escalate if people were carrying ipods around visibly watching videos on them.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
The best reason I can think of is that you don't have to think of it in advance. You don't have to know when it's on; you don't have to remember to program your TiVo/VCR. You can say any time, "Oh, yeah, I think I'd like to watch that" and download it.
Or to put in another way: true cable a la carte, which consumers have been demanding for years and unable to get.
The end of "Oh, was that good? I missed it!" would be a revolution in television.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
Er... those of us without cable television? Who will never have cable television, because we absolutely refuse to pay to view commercials?
--
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... the new ipod is music FIRST, and video SECOND. It will be sucessful trust me.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
On the contrary, I think that Apple may be tapping into a potential gold mine. There isn't much of a retail industry around online music video content at the moment. Certainly not in the same way that there is for music. If they can make the online purchase of music videos as ubiquitous as they have done for music, they stand to make a mint.
Then there's "porn in your pocket, anytime, anywhere". Could be just the thing to spice up marital play time after the kids have gone to bed
I think it is a great feature addition to an already great product.. Sure the article mentions a bunch of other products, but how well do the integrate together...
As for paying for video, I have already spent about 15 or 20 on a combination of music videos (high replay value) and a tv show (long length), the pilot to Night Stalker... and I don't even own a video capable ipod... People are talking about why a 3 or 4 minute video should cost the same as a tv episode... in most cases the tv episode will only be watched one time... maybe 2... I doubt I would ever "subscribe" to a tv show when I have a tivo... but I might get an episode here or there if they had a series that I watched often and wanted to take an episode with me...
A good video encoder card or box will cost, what, about $200.. if you want good quality... at least svideo in... That is 100 tv episodes.. Unless you were going to set up a computer based pvr or were serious about watching alot of tv on your computer... that will buy you an occasional tv episode from apple...
I think that mtv should be the next thing to worry about apple... radio stations are already suffering.. Now that people can download the videos they want and watch them where they want... why would you put up with mtv which is now as bad as the worst clearchannel station.
First of all, the Lost and Desperate Housewives downloads are US-only. So for everywhere else than the US, Apple offers basically zero content to use for their hot new video iPod right now.
Second of all, hey, and what's coming up, Apple? Pixar shorts? Probably through some Disney contract, huh? Just like how those two shows come from a Disney-owned station. Hey wait, don't tell me Disney is the ONLY company you have a video content contract with??!!
Yeah, this definitely sounds like Apple rushed it out.
When the 1st ipod came out in 2001 there was no itunes music store, no cottage industry of ipod accessories, no support for PCs and no cult of ipod. The only way to get music on your ipod was to rip cds yourself or download mp3s and get access to a Mac.
Now it's 2005 and the ipod is firmly entrenched in the American psyche and it is easy to get audio onto an ipod but difficult to get video on it unless you rip dvds or download optimized movie files yourself. The situation is hardly any different.
The difference is that in Apple's home country, ripping CDs is legal (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia) while ripping DVDs is illegal under the DMCA (MGM v. 321 Studios).
Even if now isn't the "best" time, ipod has a lot going for it.
- This product is leading the pack. Is there anything that offers the same integration for this service?
- The cult of mac. It plugs in with itunes, it's part of the ipod series... It's integrating technology.
These are the same advantages that kept ipod afloat against comparable music players. No reason to think it'll stop working now.
I just don't see the thrill of owning one of these things.. Word has been out now for a while and it's just not drilling up much buzz at all..
How often do you see someone watching a movie on their laptop? I realize it's a slightly (ok majorly) different form factor.. But still, the demand just isn't there!
~jennifer.k~
It's not like the iPod was the first MP3 player out there, it was simply the best-marketed.
There may be other portable video players on the horizon, but unless the manufacturer can out-market Apple, the iPod will still lead.
The latest QuickTime release has an Export setting for the iPod video. If you can get a video on to your computer that QuickTime can understand (which may require the use of things like Flip4Mac), you can definitely watch it on your iPod video.
Of course, there are other tools for re-encoding to H.264 and MPEG4, as well.
porncasting
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Did Apple jump the gun? Not for me.
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
Video off the Torrent, pr0n, video podcasts, music clips and home video. Moreover, its primary function is _audio playback_. Video is just gravy there. The reason why Video iPod will sell insanely well is because it's way thinner than the competition, has the functions that _audio_ competition does not have, and doesn't cost all that much more when compared to it.
And why do people pay $1.99 for a ring tone that lasts 30 seconds?
Two reasons: For one thing, the supply is low because the mobile phone network providers and the premium-rate aggregators add their own surcharges that have no counterpart on the more free wired Internet, and their part of the pie is said to be about $1.50. For another, ringtones likely come with a limited license to publicly perform the underlying musical work for the duration of the ringtone whenever the phone rings.
"But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?"
My response: "But who would pay $.99 to download a song when I could hook up to the radio and download the song for free?"
BECAUSE MY TIME IS WORTH MONEY.
Why haven't they roled a iWireless iPod out yet?
Apple is dead, Long live the Pear.
Most people want to highlight why it's bad. With music, as most slashdotters recognise, it's far more portable than video. You can listen to video while driving to work, travelling, standing in line, exercising, jogging, etc. Video requires eyeballs, of course, which are often doing other things. It might work while travelling on a train or plane, standing in line, or exercising, but video is not workable on 40% of the list I mentioned
However:
1) People do want to take video with them. Take a look at the recent portable kid video players. They've mostly been crap, but they are for kids who don't care as much about quality, and for parents who want to occupy their children on long trips and commutes. Also, if you are riding the train to work every day, why not get that extra episode in during the commute?
2) Get into the market now and define the standard everyone has to beat. Those kid players I mentioned were dismissed as toys. The iPod has a mystique as a sexy "entertainment device." The video isn't all that bad, for that size of a screen anyway, and you don't need high quality video for Desperate Housewives, it's a dialog and situationally driven show.
Apple is always on the edge. If they are first to market, a lukewarm response as the front runner is just as good as a strong success in a large field of competitors. Now the competitors have to play catchup while Apple surges forward with new ideas.
3) It's still a 30/60 GB audio iPod. The high end iPods before video could practically be replaced by the shuffle and Nano because those two fill strong niches and are just about perfect for their market segment. The high end iPod needed an update to justify it's existence. In this manner, Apple keeps the high end and justifies distributing new versions. It's similar to the idea of putting a camera in a phone. It won't but hugely useful but it will be cute and people will eventually catch on and want to have it.
Personally, I don't want a Video iPod for any of these reasons and I'm a touch of a videophile so the screen will be way too small for me. Come back to me when someone creates widely available sunglasses that project an image for me that looks like a 30 inch widescreen TV that no one else can see and I'll buy it.
However, in terms of the market, this isn't all that bad as people make it out to be. The NY times smells that, unlike the other products, the video iPod is not a huge smash, and therefore wants to start the FUD right away, just like any other sensationalistic ad-driven media whore of a news paper.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
For people who don't watch much TV, the occasional $1.99 would work out cheaper than buying a TiVO and a subscription.
Not only that, but in addition to the $400 price of a lifetime-subscribed TiVo recorder, people have to pay $600 a year to the cable television company for TV programming.
I assume you'll be able to watch it on a PC or a TV, not just a tiny iPod screen.
Which is part of why the UMD Video format, another major player in the handheld video market, isn't likely to take off.
How is this a "bad move"? A bad movies implies that this will cost Apple something, not simply that it won't take off. Some of us would call this a "sensationalist headline."
At some point Apple may choose to release a video device. You can be pretty sure it'll have a much bigger screen than the current iPods.
At this point they're offering a low res version of the TV show for $48 a season. This seems pointless to me when I can get the same episodes in High Definition with 5.1 surround sound for free less then 48 hours after most shows have aired.
I think they need to offer several levels of downloads for the shows. My suggestion would be the current resolution for $1.49, 640x480 for $1.99 and high def shows for $2.99.
Is the screen. It's great for the music UI and the few other funstions it has, but if I wanted to watch portable video there is no way a 2.5" screen would be my first choice. I'd go with something from Archos or somewhere else if I really wanted portable video. Second is the dismal battery life while using the video. Not a huge misstep for Apple, but unlike some raving Mac fans I can see it for what it is, a stop gap and not a very good one.
"But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free"
That must be one of the most stupid comments I've ever read. There are about 4 500 million people on this planet who can't record it from television without a satellite disc. Getting something like Lost from an online store is something I've been waiting for ages. It's not about some certain series, it's about same philosophy as in iTunes, there's a never-ending library of albums that you can download when ever you want.
Since VCDs became leechable online, I've downloaded thousands of movies. Last year alone I lost two terabytes of movies in hard disk failures. I'm sick and tired of downloading and archiving everything by myself. It has nothing to do with the money. I can't watch everything when it comes out and especially non-main-stream movies vanish from the Internet in couple of months. There's no other way than download and archive it by yourself, if you wan't to watch it eventually. Ofcourse I could order the same thing from a DVD-shop, but takes over a week. When I want to watch something, I want to do it that day, otherwise 'mood for the movie' is gone.
If iTunes starts to sell movies and series, I'm in! 1-2euros per episode is not much. A good set of pay-tv channels cost 30-50euros/month (atleast where I live). That's about 40e/2e = 20 episodes / month, which is about a season of any tv-series. Therefore, you could buy twelve seasons of tv-episodes for the price of a set of pay-tv channels. At the moment there are barely six series running that I watch, sometimes even less.
And about the video iPod. Fancy technical journalists are comparing it to those pocket tvs that existed over 10 years ago. They didn't sell that well. But has anything changed? Hell yes! I owned one of those crappy tvs at the time. It consumed a set of AA-batteries in two hours and its LCD screen was something like 80x60 pixels. You could barely read subtitles. And they're comparing those to movie iPod.. if it works even half as well as music iPod, it's gonna be a killer product! Mark my words.
Was picking Intel over AMD.
As Jobs has stated 3 times; video is a BONUS on top of a normal music player. the iPod has been, is, and will be a MUSIC player. Just like the additional funtionality of being able to display photo's from the photo library, or calendars and contacts, it can now display video from the video/movies library. It is NOT A VIDEO iPod. It's a music player that also happane to play some video formats. It is NOT a dedicated handheld video machine. When Apple built calendars and contacts into teh iPod, did ANYONE headline "Apple's PDA iPod a bad move?"
Why would I want to watch a movie on such a tiny screen?
*All* of these products are a non-starter as far as I
am concerned.
...that maybe the video ipod isnt the real focus for apple here? Remember a cool little device they released several months ago called the mac mini? When I fist saw the thing It was just begging to be put in front of my television. Sure, right now the quality of the content is low (too low for me to enjoy on my HDTV probably). But that all could change very quickly. If the itunes video test goes well you know they have to be thinking about it. Itunes video + higher quality + mac min = apple becoming a major player in the distibution of major network content IMHO.
The focus shouldn't be on video download prices, but rather music download prices. With reports that the RIAA is negotiating with Apple to raise the price of music downloads from $0.99 upwards, Apple now has more leverage to keep prices where they are. If a commercial-free 45 minute episode of a hit TV series only costs $1.99, how much can they expect to charge for a 4-minute pop song.
Little Bricklets
I just noticed this morning that the export dialog in quicktime has a export to iPod option (320x240) build right in. Encodes it perfectly for you. This means anything you can open in quicktime can be saved to your ipod (movies, films, tv shows, whatever you can get your hands on).
Also, you can drag and drop movies that are the right format right onto your ipod via itunes.
Another point he missed is this big announcement isn't really about the video ipod, it's about FrontRow. Streaming you entire houses music, videos, and photos (via Bonjour, previously Rendezvous) and playing them on your TV is pretty sweet. It's just a matter of time before there are huge movie selections available (probably pay-per-view and streaming only).
Chris
It's the new iPod. It just happens to do video.
From my point of view they announced the 5th gen iPod, which some were waiting for. For the same price as the 4th gen 60GB iPod color you get one with a better screen, *way* more battery life (going from 12 to 20 hrs) and smaller. Yeah, it does video, but that's not what it's really about. If the feature takes off then expect to see something new, but if it doesn't then who cares - it still costs the same.
The new iPod is what I was holding off for - a regular iPod using the latest PortalPlayer chipset to up the battery life, and maybe some new features. I suppose they might have waited for Hitachi's new 80gig perpendicular drive to up the content, but otherwise I'm happy.
And BTW, I ordered white because it's the One True iPod color. Anyone who orders black is a heretic and should be beaten.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
All this talk about it being a bad move is rather redundant , It's an iPod with a better form factor , A bigger HDD(in the cheaper version) and it plays videos .
I am currently re-ripping my DVDs in anticipation.
It would have been a bad move if:
The fact is
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The "first" bad move by Apple?
Anyone heard of the Newton? What about the Apple II GS?
This glass is only half full!
I want it thrown out! Give me one that's half empty!
Come on. The device isn't even out yet.
I see this as a great opportunity for the smaller people out there to provide unique content. Podcast subscriptions should point out that people don't want "popular" all the time. What's in itunes' top 20 podcasts?
There's only 2 podcasts that could be tied to a commercial show. Everything else is talk, news, or NPR!
I see a forbear of people willing to give original content a chance here. It's worked out well for ifilm and atom films, why couldn't it work here?
The paid content will come. It's a revenue stream, and there's nothing to suggest that other studios wouldn't follow. It's easy money and they don't have to produce a physical product unlike a DVD. If NBC gets their act together, they'll get WB up with them and get Friends on there. You want to see sales? Get that or Simpsons on there, and you've filled the ipods of every potential future client. That and some CNN broadcast videos and no one will ever complain.
The only misstep I think they made with the ipod is the current paid content. LOST is a very dark show. It's not easy to distinguish jungle environments on a small screen. They should have started with a lineup of more comedy and less drama. They could put "Whose Line Is It Anyway" on there and it would have been a lot better choice that something from the disney channel.
I don't have cable, or even an antenna, and I'm currently abroad, but I like Lost. I bought the DVD set on the recommendation of a friend and really liked it, so I'd like to watch season 2 now. As I said, I don't have the means to watch it, so I've been downloading the new episodes via bittorrent.
Then the itunes announcement came, and I was pretty psyched. I had already seen the latest episode they had for download, but I bought it anyway. I earn quite a bit more than $1.99 in the time it takes me to set up the torrent download, so it's a good deal for me. And I do feel bad about downloading the episodes illegally, so the $2 is good for that, too.
Unfortunately, the episode looks like absolute crap. It's old-school TV format, not widescreen, and it's compressed way too much. They're well aware of this, which is why the video plays in a tiny window in itunes by default. They make these episodes in HDTV widescreen, and if I'm going to be giving them money, that's what I want. Compared to the box set I bought, I'm paying more per episode for way less quality. I started buying music from itunes because of the convenience and then bought an ipod shuffle because of that. If this is what Apple has to offer in the way of video, then I'm not going to follow them down that road.
I have a PSP with a giant memory stick, and I really wish it were easier to get content on there, especially DVDs I own. I've done it, but it's not trivial, and Sony's filesystem layout and file format for movies is absurd. Hopefully the ipod video will spur some progress in conversion utilities and get Sony to make things a bit less stupid.
(the main reason I don't have an antenna, cable, tivo, etc. is to ration how much I watch TV; I find I waste a lot more time on it when I have free reign)
Nothing like low-res porn on a 2-inch screen to get the wife all hot and bothered.
I also make this claim. Yes, it is not a "great" video player, just as yes, it is not a "great" games machine. First and formost better ipod, more storage, nicer screen, thinner, and it also plays videos, why not, it also plays games, and stores photos.
On top of this I can do this whole new thing, and as to the dowloading from the internet thing. You're kidding yourself if you don't start finding IPOD specific torrent material start showing up.
who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
The same people who would buy a song off of iTunes for a dollar rather than download it through BitTorrent/some p2p program for free.
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
The price od the ipod is still the same at 299 it just now has 30gb and video abilities so if people were buying the ipod without video why would video mkae them stop
... is the most obvious oversight, but keep in mind: the base iPod now has a larger screen and larger HDD, for _the same price_ as before. $299. The 60gb iPod is IIRC _cheaper_ than the old 60gb.
In terms of just simple iPod updates, these are pretty good. The video is a nice bonus, and the screen size is appropriate for vodcasts.
Yes, Apple should have a DVR. Yes, Apple should have a DVD 'ripper' into the device so you can watch your own DVD rips without a lot of hoop jumping.
Still, these updates stand on their own, and I may even get the black one, once I land a permanent job...
I think the main misstep Apple has made so far is limiting the video resolution of the purchased video to 320x240. According to Jobs, we're supposed to be in "The Year of HD", but 320x240 is lower resolution than DVD, lower than most MPEG-4 on bittorrent, lower than TiVo, even lower than conventional television signals; H.264 is a truly wonderful video compression codec, but that resolution is simply an unacceptable level of quality.
What Apple got right from the beginning of the iTunes Music Store was hitting "the sweet spot" with regards to ACC audio; to 98% of the people out there, 128kps ACC encoding sounded as good as the CDs and mp3s they were used to, no nothing substantial was "lost" by purchasing online via iTunes -- and the convenience is sometimes worth it.
However, no one can honestly say nothing substantial is lost if you're watching 700 mps H.264 320x240 video on anything other than an iPod; it's qualitatively simply not as good as the competition. It looks blocky when enlarged on your computer and when piped to a TV, and it most certainly will look embassingly bad if outputted to HDTV.
I understand that is resolution is currently a technical limitation of the iPod's video capabilities, but I think it's short sighted to assume that "320x240 should be enough for everyone"; I'd be much more into the idea if Apple had also announced "HD downloads" for $2.99 or $3.99. Online distribution should be all about increasing the quality, not decreasing it.
~jeff
Apple is too smart: it's not trying to introduce something _new_, it's simply building upon its existing infrastructure - i.e. the highly successful iTunes and iPod family and offer it with new features. Apple isn't trying to sell the new iPod as a "portable video device", it's still selling it as an "iPod, but now with video" - it's an incremental change, that doesn't cost Apple a whole lot of a risky bet, and gives them some leverage into a new revenue channel. This is probably the smartest way to go about it. So, even if the iPod doesn't become the de-facto "portable video player", then Apple doesn't lose much. Many people will still continue to buy the iPod because (as my brother in law did 4 weeks ago), it's the best portable music player out there, but now, people will be pleased that in addition, it offers video capability. Look at the price too - people were clearly willing to pay out at the existing price level for a standard non-video iPod, now for virtually the same price, you're getting video capability. In other words, it's such a low risk bet for Apple - they aren't taking a bet on mass-producing millions of these devices at a high price, with the risk that the product will fail - the product is already a solid seller, even without video capability.
I have an iRiver music player that I use constantly. But it doesn't do video (at least not out of the box). I have a Sharp Zaurus that does play video, but it takes some time consuming transcoding and doesn't have much storage.
But with the vPod, finally, I can watch video on the go like I used to listen to music. I can catch up on my TV while jogging and mountain biking, mowing the lawn, painting the house, driving to work. Even while at work!
Yep, this is going to be big for me.
I laugh everytime I see somebody plop down 2 bucks or more for a quart of "flavored" water. Now THAT is a ripoff! Hell, CDC and several others have proven that almost all municipal water systems have tap water better than some "designer" water. All goes to the keep up with the Jones I guess. Same could be said for the iPod, SUV's living in the "right" house, buying the "right" clothes. People chasing crap. Their money, not mine......more power to them LOL
I'd call that a big mistake on Apple's part. My 2003 Powerbook should not be considered ancient, yet I would be forced to use USB 1.1 if I decided to "upgrade". Not cool, Apple. They saved, what, $10 by eliminating the chipset??
I was all set to buy one and get rid of my 3G until I found this out.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
"But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?" Just like how you can record music from the radio and stick it onto your iPod. Strange how ITMS is doing so well.
What you have to keep in mind is that the vPod is really just an iPod with video capability. It's thinner and has bigger capacity at the same price! People who want iPod still can just use it as a regular iPod.
Now, what you are missing is that most of this content will be bough off the iTMS and watched on the computer or TV. Look at Job's streaming webcast. FrontRow is center stage here. The Mac has just become like a PVR, but with purchasable content on demand.
FrontRow is an interface to be used on Low-Res TVs. It displays all of your home's (aka network's [via Bonjour, previous rendezvous]) photos, music, and videos and can play them on your TV.
You'll be able to download entire seasons of shows (cheaper pricing just like music albums) and watch them whenever you want.
Movies are likely to be pay-per-view and stream from apple's servers. Basically, when you want to watch something, you'll be able to turn on your TV and order it. Sounds good to me....
The vPod is just a way to make it mobile, but that is not the novel thing here.
Chris
It's an iPod, it will sell. That's not hard to understand. I've tried to point my friends towards Creative portable music players, my favorite brand, because i don't support iTunes and the Apple drm schemes. But my friends make it clear - the quality of the player doesn't matter, having an iPod is like having a RAZR or wearing K Swiss - it's all about the brand. It's an iPod, people will buy it.
Okay, here's what a lot of people aren't quite getting:
1. It's not a 'Video iPod', it's just an iPod. This iPod is replacing the previous bunch of iPods. It's the same price, with slighty better features. And it's smaller than the old top-of-the-line iPods.
2. Video is an extra bonus feature.
There is no downside here if you don't think of it as a dedicated video player but rather just think of it as a music player that can also view videos. Apple isn't bringing a video player to market too early, they're bringing out a new version of their extremely popular music player which will also give them the opportunity to capture a big chunk of the portable video market if and when it ever actually appears.
My main complaints with a "Video iPod" when the idea was first breached was that I didn't want to have a player that was too bulky to use as a normal music player like I do with my current 4th Gen 20gig iPod. What Apple actually came out with was a player that was less bulky than the old iPod for the exact same price. And while I wouldn't want to watch movies on the iPod screen, I would be up for watching episodes of television shows and video podcasts (e.g., Rocketboom and the like) on it.
Far from being a mistake, Apple has taken the crappy situation of how to market a portable video player where there's no real portable video player market and has reduced it to the problem of how to sell a music player, which they already know the solution to.
which I don't think it is, since getting a show for $2 is pretty damn sweet (assuming you're not one to usually pirate), this new iPod is still pretty much *the same price* as the previous generation. So you still get the color screen, but now a bigger HD andn a slicker look than the previous iPods for almost the same cost. Why would it be a flop then? Even if you're not interested in watching videos on it but were looking to buy a full sized iPod anyway, you would buy this product. No doubt many people will do just this, not buying in to the videos.. and then one day they'll check out the video content just out of interest and suddenly Apple will tap in to a whole market of incidental video buyers. Many of these will then likely turn out to be regular buyers. Apple is also wise in moving in the movie distribution direction as many of the film studios are far more open to online distribution than the RIAA and I would bet on the fact that some of them have been courting Apple to set up a distribution channel.
Apple is LOSING MY MONEY because of content resolution.
:cough: other sources.
I would have been happy to support LOST by buying episodes through the iTMS - even though they're more expensive than the DVD and have no special features - but if and only if the they come in the same widescreen format and resolution that I can get from..
I'm standing here waving my money in the air and - no one's selling what I want to buy.
The same situation goes for the music store - the new album by The Bad Plus is available, however it's only available in compressed AAC. I want the best quality - I actually want it in DVD-Audio. My other option is a copy protected "CD" that I refuse to purchase. Blah.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Do we care?
It's thinner, lighter, has a bigger screen, stores 10gb more. It also happens to play videos, if you want it to.
And most importantly it costs exactly the same as the old iPod.
So why is it a bad move? Why is it anything but a positive move? Even if the video part is complete and utter tripe how does that hurt anyone?
a couple of things:
first, the video ipod will sell well, regardless of whether or not people are using the video capabilities. it is first and foremost an ipod, and for that fact alone you can expect the same sorts of sales that the ipod has seen thus far (assuming that market forces, etc. don't change significantly in the short term).
second, i think the article severely underestimate the market for music video downloads. the margins on the music videos are insane (even more so than on the music itself)
third, this is the next logical step in apple owning media computing. even if this is initially a loss leader, i expect that the payoff in terms of driving the market will more than make up for it.
If you're on a mac it's brain dead easy.
PC, it's a little trickier, but still not out of grasp.
I've taken MPEG1, divx, and xvid files out of my system, thrown them into Cleaner XL, and I have ipod video compliant files. whoo. It's a bit more expensive than virtual dub, but it works, and you don't have to rig it up like you do virtual dub. You choose what you what, encode it, and it'll be done in a few hours time.
I'm primarily posting this to point out that anyone who bitches about this because it doesn't play xvid or whatever codec "du jour" it's not impossible to get content on there.
I would imagine that about 60% of you know someone who does video professionally for a living. Seek us out. We can explain that it's not as hard as it seems to get the job done.
This is certainly far easier than it was figure out how to rip DVD's.
Why can't someone, who owns a DVD of a movie, use Quicktime or something, and rip and encode a version for their iPod? Seems like a FAIR USE to me.
It was, until October 1998 when the 105th Congress of the United States enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that made it a crime 1. to break the CSS encryption on DVD Video titles except in the way prescribed by the copyright owner, or 2. to sell devices capable of doing so. Don't blame me; it was the world I was born into, and I was too young in November 1996 to have voted for the 105th Congress.
Apple has NOT taken over the P2P market. It is still as strong as ever. Apple captured the 95% of the population that wanted an easy legal way to get music that was compatible with what they currently had. Any other device will do the same when combined with another music service, apple simply marketed better than they had. Notice that the ipod didn't become popular until you could get itunes on a windows box and the tv commercials came out. The people that used to get music illegally still are.
Given the choice between paying $400 for a device and $2 a program and paying just $400 for a device and hooking it up to their PVR, people will take the cheaper road. Dish already has such a device and Comcast is on its way, so people that use those services (probably at least 50% of the population combined, if not more) will buy devices that are compatible with what they have. I'm sure there are people out there that will think "oooh shiny!", but when Dish sends you an advertisement or runs commercials saying "hey look! we have a device you can just plug right up and get TV on the go! And you don't have to PAY for the programs you take with you!", which the WILL do, then its a no brainer.
I'm exporting a movie from Quicktime in iPod format right now... seems pretty easy to me. Shouldnt be too difficult to get OSX to find the programs on my MythTv box and re-format it for the iPod over night. sync it in the morning, watch it on the way to work...
sounds easy enough.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
Because the certain episode of Lost that you want to see may not be replaying for another few weeks, you're not sure if you'll be home at the time, and the next new episode is tonight and you think it's connected to the episode you missed. You want to see that episode now .
It's like asking why someone would buy a CD for a song they heard on the radio when they could just wait to hear it on the radio itself. Stupid question. You don't want to hassle around to record it, you want to control it, and you want it now.
Plus, if the video portion of iTMS works like the music portion, we could see a lot of indie producers breaking in with short episodes, both animated or non.
Instead, I think Apple is shooting themselves in the foot because they are flooding the market. Now you have, what, 6 different MP3 players, with prices ranging from $100 to $500?
original iPod
iPod Photo
iPod Mini
iPod Shuffle
iPod Nano
and now iPod Video
Yes, the Photo and Video offer more than just music playback, but that's still what they're mainly sold as.
So the iPod is now on the market and if Steve and the gang at Apple want to the next release of iTunes could bring in Ripping from DVD. No new hardware to buy and suddenly the market for the new iPod grows.
.Mac, this connects your .Mac account to the iTunes store and lets you cache the shows you like in the .Mac file space. This release is partnered with a new Mini, with Front Row, a remote, and a HDMI interface to go with the existing DVI interface. Front Row gets an added feature that connects to your .Mac account and streams your video via broad band. The interesting thing is that apple will not need to give everyone their own copy of the actual media, they would only have to support a 'On Demand' type interface that would link you to the media when needed.
.Mac Media Library with you, sync it to your iPod, you already own it...
Next thing we see is a new feature on
If you want to take something from your new
What other source has as many nicely encoded music videos as apple? TiVo? 2000 is a lot of music videos! Also, don't you think Apple is going to surprise with extra weekly video content? By the time January rolls around, who knows how much there will be.
No, it's not absolutely perfect in every possible way for every possible person (and couldn't be, as some people's wants and needs in players run entirely opposite others'). It does, however, have a large number of real advantages, most or all of which are selling points for a broad cross-section of the audience for MP3 players. Yes, it's also had good marketing, but that's certainly not the only reason it's doing well.
is all i have to say.
May I remind everyone that the famous project iPodLinux, a so far successful attempt to port Linux to the iPod, gives the video functionality to the iPod Photo. And not just the iPod Photo, for that matter. It gives video support to every iPod except for the Nano and the Video, which is probably being worked on as I type. The video worked with sound and everything. The only issue currently is the power and CPU usage, which is also being worked on. I, personally, am fully content with my 30GB iPod Photo. It can already do what people now have to pay $299 to do. One problem Apple is having is the way they release products. Everyone was content with the Mini and Photo, but they instantly replaced it with a Nano, and then a month later, the Video. There is no more normal-sized iPod, and no more compact Mini either. Just an iPod you break if you breathe on it the wrong way and an iPod that ate too much. If you haven't thrown out your iPod yet, feel free to email me to get video working on it. If you have a grayscale iPod, you will only be able to view grayscale videos. It involves encoding your video with a handy tool named Mencoder, which, being open-source, will work on Windows, OSX, and Linux. You run it with one command through a terminal, and then wait for it to finish up. Nothing ever has to be 'official' to work. Hardware is hardware, and as long as we have hackers and Linux users out there, we will always have the ability to work around the limits that big corporations put upon us.
The iRiver H300 series has been able to do this for how long? I'd have to say between 1.5 and 2 years. Yes, the support is pretty minimal as they have to be re-encoded in a smaller resolution and in some sort of MPEG standard format, but nonetheless, iRiver has been way ahead of Apple when it comes to all around media jukeboxes. They also have a bulkier version that holds 40 GB and 60 GB that can natively (that is, using the firmware that comes with it rather than the European or Japanese/Korean versions) play movies as well, and at the cost of or less than that of the Photo iPod. Personally, I never really found it to be useful to be able to watch TV shows, movies, and/or porn on a small screen (even using the ginormous PSP and its 2-3 hour battery) no matter how portable.
With the advent of all this newer and better HD technology (at least the ones that aren't crippled with DRM), I really fail to see the reason to want to downgrade to a lowres, limited battery, low power sound version of something that could be played on a 60" HD display with 6.1 surround sound ~600 watt speakers, all fibrely connected. Couple that with networking, MythTV to record broadcasted crap, and massive amounts of disk space, and I think you'd laugh your ass off at the thought of using something so primitive as a Video iPod or multimedia jukebox like the iRiver.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
The law specifically states that fair use is a defense
to copyright infringement. Fair use as interpreted by federal appeals courts in Universal v. Reimerdes and MGM v. 321 Studios is not a defense to circumvention, which is separate from copyright infringement, nor is it a defense to selling circumvention devices, which is also separate from copyright infringement.
I may be very, horribly wrong about this, but didn't Apple ease into the music buisness by doing what it does best: enabling people to get stuff done? Take something complex and make it simple? I used SoundJam with my old PowerBook, mp3's all over my PB and G3 and then Apple came along, snatched up SoundJam and gave birth to this stupid-simple way to - wait for it - rip, mix, burn all my music. To be perfectly honest, I don't own all the music I've ripped. I have heaps of stuff from ex-girlfriends (glad I always ripped 192kbs w/variable bitrate on) that I never bought. Apple enabled people to do what they've always done in the era of albums and mix tapes - and go one better! Then they brought out a way to transport the music - iPod - and slowly but surely tried to confer legitimacy on something that hitherto had been something slightly dodgy. Now how does this affect video? I wonder ... to me, the test is: does it help me store/view/manipulate stuff I've 'found' on the internet like, say, REVENGE OF THE SITH (hehe) and use it in a meaningful way. Hell, what is meaningful and how do people really want to work with video?! This whole thing strikes me as a mindshare/market research exercise.
Apple wants to know how we consume video and what we want to do with it. And THEN they'll find a way to exploit it for maximum profit.
Best idea I prediction I saw was for movie download/burning stations at Apple Stores across America, creating a wholly new distribution channel for movies.
Discuss!
> But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
Me.
I don't have time. $2 is more than worthy if I can avoid waiting for my favourite shows, which always come up when I can't watch them. And I'd avoid buying the same episode ovber and over, which is a very bad habit of present airings. Of course, there's still the other problems (viewer cost, bad video quality etc.)
PS: As a side note, please don't use this crap as example. I mean Lost. Never a title was so appropriate in designate the Lost time of those who watch it. Something should really do something about this show. I guess we shouldn't have complained so much about Star Trek writers... just when you thought it couldn't get worse... "Lost" comes by. Please, have mercy on my hurt eyes.
Apparently the RIAA has mod points on Slashdot.
(disclaimer: I do not work for, nor benefit from, Neuros Audio. I just like their products and their business ethic.)
I purchased a beta model of the 442. The software is still in very early stages of development; except for the main menu, most functions are still file-system based. This means no shuffle for music playing; you go into a directory and press "play" from where you want to start. Keep in mind, this is a very early release of the software; the goal is to upgrade the firmware with features the community wants.
The video player will play back MPEG4/DivX 3.11/4.0/5.0/WMV v9 (from the the specs). It will record MPEG SP with G.726 audio 30fps@704x240resolution, MS ASF format (also from the specs). It'll play back to a TV in NTSC or PAL.
I had to transcode my MST3k videos to a supported DivX resolution, but otherwise everything works beautifully. The playback was superb, and the sound output is better than my TV (exactly what you'd expect).
The unit is a little large (and at 325g, very solid), especially compared to the iPOD, but *extremely* stylish, with an excellent screen.
The really excellent news is this: Joe Born and his crew are producing dev boards, which they will sell to the community for cost. They are actively supporting a Linux port to the device.
Anyway, I love this device. A lot. A whole lot. I pack it wherever I go-- 9 hours audio playback, 5 hours video. Not great, but it'll last a plane ride and a couple of movies. And I'm patiently waiting for the dev board spec to get finalized so I can help with porting Linux to this device. The only thing I'm really missing on this device is Nethack.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
This is a classic case of the chicken and egg. If there is no userbase that is capable of playing videos, content producers will be reluctant to release their content for sale on ITMS. There is little profit to be made without a viable market and it is a risky move in many respects. But without content, people will say that Apple is making a bad move. I think Apple is right now cashing in on the legitimacy of the iPod brand as well as making an investment in the future -- which is video. By being the first to market with a video device, they can control file formats as well as the distribution channel (ITMS). Not to mention the benefits to the brand..
Obviously you won't find this in any Apple corporate presentations, but pr0n - pornography on the video iPod will help make it a success.
Experiences from countries with 3G cell networks show that a substantial portion of the additional bandwidth available to subscribers is consumed for sex or adult related content. With an efficient distribution and sync mechanism like RSS in the form of podcasting, or should we say pr0ncasting, I am sure the video iPod in current and future incarnations will be a success.
The future is in beta
What do you get with all the other devices that you don't get from the Video iPod?
If you want a high capacity music player, then you want an iPod - everyone wants an iPod; they're cool.
Uhm... I don't want an iPod. I think they are overrated, overpriced, underfeatured, and bland. I *do* love the click-wheel thingy, though. That was what made the iPod great, the interface.
Otherwise, they are just like most of the other MP3 players out there, near as I can tell, only more expensive. And, they won't play ogg vorbis, my format of choice.
So, I don't want one, at least in the $399 sense of the word.
- Tony
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
With the audio ipod, you can trivially and legally take your purchased music CDs, put them in the computer, and have them added to your itunes library, and synced to your ipod.
For the video ipod, you can do none of this with your purchased video DVDs. I can't see any sort of video ipod miracle happening until joe user can do this.
The one button mouse was their first good move?
When Apple released the iPod Photo, I thought my mother would really like something she could listen to music on as well as haul around pictures of her family.
Now that Apple has released a video player, I'm thinking the same thing.
Last holiday-season, I got a new digital camera that takes 15fps video with sound. I spent the summer recording short films of our kids playing baseball, jumping off swingsets, doing cartwheels... exactly the kind of thing that a grandmother might want to carry around in a pocket size device that can also hold music, photos, contacts, notes and solitaire.
I'm thinking this may be the year my mom gets an iPod loaded with home movies.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
While I like in theory the ability to download music, TV episodes, and other media off of the internet for a negligible price, I take exception to getting it in a low-quality format.
:-)
Currently, I'm ripping my CDs to FLAC for use on my stereo, and to MP3 or WMA for my MP3 player. I've tried several formats, and any lossy format just sounds bad on my stereo. So I won't be buying any AAC files from ITMS: it costs about the same as a regular CD, but offers a lower sound quality, and is heavily DRMed on top of it, and you're forced to use iTunes.
Same goes for the videos/TV shows/films: I can buy DVDs, and rip them to any format (for my Palm Tungsten, motorola e398...), and still enjoy the best video and sound quality by watching the original DVD. $2 is not expensive for a TV show, but it IS expensive for a TV show you can only watch on a minuscule screen, at a very low resolution. If I'm shelling out $2 for a show, I want it up on my big screen. There's enough good, old stuff around that I have yet to see, so I can wait for the DVDs to come out, and not rush to get a next-day fix.
I do like the iPod's hardware, though
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You can convert your own videos easily, and oddly enough it uses the same format as the PSP videos, though it will only play videos formated for 320x200 (many psp videos are 368 x 208 since that is the screens native resolution). but that means you can use all those nice PSP video conversion tools to make video for your IPOD videos, talk about Irony!
I thought it was strange that only quick time would play my converted PSP videos...but I think this might be the final nail the PSP's coffin. The lack of games for the PSP was always offset by the fact that it was a nice little movie player, but now that I can get a Ipod with a 30 gig hard drive that can play video for 50 bucks more, OUCH! Of course the screen is not widescreen, but it is more than adequate for watching music videos and tv shows, after all who is expecting the cinematic experience on a two inch screen anyways.
I could possibly see such a service working, if it acted like a subscription based series of "channels". i.e. you paid $15 a month or whatever to watch a MTV-like channel, or a movie channel, or a comedy channel etc. that you primed with your favourite shows. I cannot see it working at all if they expect people to pay per show and to sit around the several hours for the show to actually download.
Not very many people were buying music online or music players at the time the iPod came out. But that's irrelevant from what I can tell. It seems to me that Apple finds markets where people think there isn't one by taking a good idea and making it accessible to non-geeks. End of story.
There are other analogs out there to this. Remember what the Internet was like prior to the World Wide Web and Netscape and AOL (shudder) making it accessible to normal human beings? The popularity of the Internet utterly exploded when those came about because suddenly non-geeks could use it. Prior to that, I bet lots of people who use the web on a daily basis would have claimed no need for a computer in their life. A market was created by de-geeking it.
Once they've done that and once they do it in a way that makes sense to people who don't live and work 24/7 behind a keyboard, then they've got a hot product on their hands and a market where nobody saw one before. That's why all these "iPod killers" that have come and gone have failed to make a dent in Apple's dominance. It's not the hardware superiority. It's the overall design, the iPod and how easy it is to use with iTunes and the music store and how well designed it is and the interface and blah blah blah.
So anyone who thinks Apple is going to flub the video iPod is failing to learn from history. Now that TV shows can be downloaded and watched without having to use torrents or Usenet or complicated tools to reassemble large files or download codecs that make it playable, it will certainly be a success. And there are loads of people out there more than happy to pay $2 to avoid all that hassle.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
>> But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes
>> if the iPod could also hook up to your television and
>> record that same episode free?
I would pay $1.99 on a regular basis to download "free" broadcast television shows...
1. that I found out about after missing the broadcast
2. or that I just plain forgot to watch or record.
My guess is that a content provider could expect about $10 of my business @$2 per pop on a monthly basis for such stuff. This is about what I spend now renting movies from Blockbuster per month.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
...true cable a la carte, which consumers have been demanding for years and unable to get
You just nailed it, at least for me! I also watch fewer than 10 hours a month. Moreover, I would love to watch shows not available in North America (Canada, in my case), like outstanding documentaries from the BBC, which I only get to watch when I go there (no, BBC Canada does not include them). Or from there, why not the best public broadcating from around the world? -- I don't sig, therefore I don't exist
I have an RCA Lyra A/V jukebox that does this quite well, it allows you to record from or output to your TV/Stereo/VCR/DVD player very easilly, I paid less for it than I would have for a regular iPod (don't know the price point of the video one, but I suspect it's higher) has USB as well as a CF card reader, comes with a 20gig hard drive (and is easilly upgradeable to a larger hardrive (many people have gone 80-100gig)) does not require any special software on the computer and as such is completely platform independant, and I find the user interface more intuitive (take someone who has never read any instructions or been told anything about an iPod and see how long it takes to figure out the "intuitive" scroll wheel (there's nothing on the device to say it even exists...)
Nope. Everyone's eventually going to make and sell these, and Apple did it first (arguably; Archos, maybe) and quite well (from what I've seen). Combined with their iTunes back-end, this makes them the only real player in this market. Just watch, these things will sell like hotcakes.
Apple's First Bad Move was letting Microsoft win on the desktop.
While hardly a HD res, the IPOD also supports mp4 2.5mps 480x480 resolution. ::sigh::
For NTSC, the picture occupies approximately 480 of the 525 scan lines. For broadcasts the portion of a scan line that is visible can hold up to about 440 dots so a grid 480 high by 440 wide represents the maximum amount of picture detail possible. This means any show properly encoded will look just fine on a regular TV, like the one I own
I ordered a 60 gig, why? because it's cheap, for the same price I could get a 30 gig creative vision that wont fit in my pocket. It's just a good deal, and I've never been a big apple guy before. (I don't mean new york)
imo the #1 reason why the video ipod hasn't had the spark apple think it deserves is because portable video (dvd and hdd based) never became so widely successful and most likely never will be. Unlike music, which takes up only one sense for entertainment, video takes up two. In otherwords, with music you don't necesarily have to set aside time to listen to it, which is why a music ipod was such a logical success. However, with video you do and for most people to set aside time to watch things on a little screen is asking for too much. Yes, it can be plugged into a tv, and yes, you can watch it on an airplane but that's not frequent enough for people to want to buy it.
I'm an avid fan of Lost, and I don't live in the US right now, which is a bit of a problem for the former. I've been relying on internet piracy to watch this show, and when I heard about Lost being available for download from Apple, I was overjoyed.
So I grabbed the first four episodes of Season 2, and started watching one. And I notice there's no letterbox. And the video is really jerky, and doesn't handle fast cuts or pans at all. So here I am, thinking I'm doing the right thing by paying for the download, only to find out that I'm getting a poorly-encoded pan-and-scan version of the show.
Alright, ideally they shouldn't have to worry about competition from pirates, but the fact is that piracy is a reality. And if you want to fight piracy, you have to provide something of equal or greater value than the pirates are willing or able to give. I want to be able to watch Lost on my widescreen TV through my computer's TV-Out card, roughly the way it was meant to be viewed.
I'm annoyed that Apple has used a proprietary format that isn't supported by any other media players. My primary gripe with it is that I'm forced into using Apple's underfeatured video player to watch my TV shows. Why can't they make a Directshow filter for it, complete with whatever DRM they want to use, so that I can play it in Media Player Classic, or God forbid, my PSP?
I sincerely hope they have some sort of plan to iron these issues out in the near future.
or as the blurb put it: "who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?"
People who missed taping an episode?
The new iPod is indeed not very good for video, but that doesn't matter: none of the other video devices are very good either. By adding video to their MP3 player now, in a simple way, Apple will get exposure and feedback that they will use to improve the device. Give them a couple of iterations to get it right.
Not really. The Pixar/Disney deal ended in 2004. One last Pixar film, "Cars", will be distributed by Disney, and then Pixar is free of Disney.
The original concept of the deal was that Disney would provide the story expertise and character design. Pixar would do the rendering. It didn't work out that way. Pixar turned out to be far more original then Disney. It's clearly time for Pixar to dump Disney.
Disney is mostly a distributor at this point; their good stuff, like "Valiant" and "Narnia", isn't created by Disney but comes from third-party distribution deals. Most of Disney's own new content is rehashes of their earlier stuff ("Cinderella" on DVD, "Pirates of the Carribean II", "Tarzan Special Edition", "Herbie, Fully Loaded".) Big ideas are in short supply in Burbank.
Screw TV. That's a neat feature, but not why it's going to be a big seller. Its big market is parents with digital cameras. Here's a case study based on my own life.
:-)
We bought a pocket-sized midrange digital camera last spring, with a single 1gb memory card. Like most midrange digital cameras, ours can capture 5 megapixel images and it can record continuous video at TV resolutions up to the limit of its memory. An empty 1gb card can hold abot 700 5-megapixel images or about 700 seconds of video in any combination. It's so powerful and so small that we have pretty much abandoned our other film and video cameras.
We have kids. Kids do cute stuff which we want to show grandma, so we take gobs of digital stills and video. Grandma lives over the river and through the woods and has neither broadband internet nor even a computer. But grandma does have a TV. So to show grandma videos or unprinted stills at her house, we must have a portable player that connects to the TV. The camera came with a cable that lets it output to a TV and it works well enough for playback of both still and video images. The playback interface is rudimentary, but it works so long as someone familiar with the camera is running the show.
But there's a problem with this. When we have the camera full of images to show grandma, we have little or no room on the memory card with which to take more photos or video of our kids or grandma's myriad other grandkids. This is a much bigger problem than those without kids might think.
To solve this problem, we could buy more memory cards and swap them in and out of the camera. It would suck for usability: "Hang on while I swap cards... blast, that's not the right one either. Honey, which card has the video of baby's first cookie?"or "Yeah, I forgot to turn the camera off before I put in the card... but why is the card blank now?" It'd also rapidly become very expensive. Gigabyte SD cards cost about $75 each at Costco, last I looked.
For the price of four additional 1 gig cards, I could get a 30 gig iPod photo. For the price of six, I could get a 60 gig model and still take the kids to see Wallace and Gommit. With even the 30 gig model, we could cart all of our photo and video library to Grandma's house or wherever else we go. We could keep the camera empty and ready to shoot pics of the cousins even while playing videos for granny, instead of tying it to the TV and running down its battery as a rudimentary playback device. And I bet the video iPod's UI will be simple enough that grandma herself can browse the content, instead of one of us running the show while boring her with a typical slideshow monologue.
We needs a video iPod, precious. And we are far from alone in this need.
And that's why TV is just a marketing gimmick. Sure, they'll make money on video download sales. But that's not the killer app... that's just a demonstration that will make the general public take notice of the device's capability to play back anything. Apple is first to market with a general digital media playback device that has a grandma-compliant user interface, and they have incredible brand recognition at the outset. They are going to make an absolute killing off of the digital camera user base, which is just going to keep getting bigger.
This will not be a flop.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
BitTorrent is every bit as centralised as Napster, it relies on centralised trackers which, has has now been demonstrated on several occasions, are just as easy to shut down as Napster - if not more-so.
Its not video iPod or iPod video. Its a 5th Generation iPod with Video.
iPod video would have its primarily purpose for playing video. The 5G iPod is still primarily music player with some video functionality. Apple is testing the waters, unfortunately way too many ignorant people are calling it a "video iPod" or a "iPod video" when it is not.
I recently got a new phone and within a day had purchased the Bluetooth USB device to allow BitPim to talk to the phone, and followed forum posts to get music and movies transferred over, and also set the music as a ringtone.
According to this article: "By using BREW (which is branded Get It Now), Verizon locks users into their programs only, and making it impossible to install anything Verizon doesn't offer. To compliment this processes, programs such as the internal mail reader in some phones were removed forcing people to buy expensive mail readers from Get It Now." So how do I get it now?
This is a very narrow minded post and the article to boot. Apple does not, out of the box, let me connect my iPod to my CD player or stereo for recording, so why would I expect the iPodVideo to do that. I am sure the new iTunes will allow you to put video content on the thing via your PC, just like it does for music.
Now, I do not know if it does this or not, but, it would be very cool to hook the iPodVideo up to the TV for playback; like I can do with the iPod and my stereo.
Jamey Kirby
You never know what will catch on and what won't. It is a combination of psychology and faddery that makes something take off or not. Such decisions should be considered "managed risk". The US has to specialize in risk because everything else predictable is moved to low-wage countries, and low-wage countries don't like risk for obvious reasons. (Well, we don't either, but it is our comparative advantage, so we have little choice).
Table-ized A.I.
Who in heck CARES if PVR functionality will come along? (And personally I think it will, and with Apple... The Mac mini is likely to be wedged into a role in the entertainment center anyway, and the iPod in conjunction with it.) What "can be done" or "will be done" isn't the point--it will come in due time (where it isn't already... just little known or able to be noticed); what is important is breaking down the first barriers to electronic distribution so that more barriers will follow. What Apple did with music they may be able to do to video as well, and where THAT will lead is only encouraging.
:P ) and channelled through the undisputed heavyweight champion of the portable music/media devices is the best way to jumpstart what we've ALL been hoping for and bitching about for years.
...not to mention that getting things out faster and more furiously (yeah, yeah... shut it) works well to consumer advantage, as both the content providers and the competitors to Apple in this will jump into it all more blindly than they would have otherwise to try to stay at the head of the game. Which means it's far LESS likely that they'll have thought out how to force all their rights into the distribution channel, or conspire with the media companies to drain us for whatever they can get. Competition in this case will be much more frentic and misdirected... in the way that WE can take advantage of. ;-)
Does it have optimal visual quality, the best distribution format, an open rights management policy, or any of the other issues we can and do think of surrounding this...? Of course not. But getting a top-tier publishing company on board the most popular online music distributor (legal downloads that is... you know what I mean
Good stuff, wot?
Well, here's the problem. The iPod, and the entire Apple experience, is intuitive for a certain kind of person. Artists, fashion mavens, leftists, and other creative personalities can sit in front of a fifth-generation iPod and just "get it," but accountants and everyday pencil-pushers don't have a prayer. Unattractive squares should stick to Linux and Windows. Macs are for different thinkers.
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Evidence?
http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/5269/img01318b
http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/3639/img66457j
http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/4251/img02729p
http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/7792/img08079i
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3600/img10156rv.
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2539/soho0uj.j
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5614/img66606p
http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/6756/img64271jj.
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5082/bleeder0w
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1672/img85083c
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7234/img82642a
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/787/img60047ow
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/4819/img58719t
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/9681/img46882w
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/8519/img45081g
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/3102/img39464t
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7783/img07414p
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5816/img07328r
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5096/img07309m
Versus:
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/3118/ms1by.jpg
http://img270.imageshack.us/img270/7789/linuxnylu
The pornpod will be a yanking success. While you will not want to be watching porn in the Mall (according to CNN) you will be subscribing to loads of serial porn. Go porn go! Once again porn drives innovation.
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
Porn is going to be the true killer app for the video ipod.
I'll tell you who. Someone who would rather pay a little under 6 dollars for three TV episodes they want to buy instead of $15-$20 for a DVD of them in a post-broadcast flag world....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Since when has iTunes been a real source of profit for apple? It's not.
I see it's value in the ability to import/play video files you can record yourself, that is if it can, I don't have or and havn't read anything that mentioned the formats it can play. The value of the audio iPod is not iTunes, but it's ability to import your pre existing CD collection. I don't buy the DRM-ed music from iTunes, I buy used CDs and import to my iPod. If I were to get a video iPod I'd want the ability to use my existing collection of hundreds of TV recordings. It will most likely require some re-encoding to some apple format or MPEG1, but should be possible. Or would be very nice if it were possible.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Apple realises that often the 'geeks' have some great ideas about new techology. The problem is that we don't always understand how to make it available in a form that your average punter would appreciate. Apple manages to take a lot of this stuff, add some eye candy and useability additions and then manages to sell it to people who want the power but don't want to open the manual.
RTFM? Sure, but it would certainly by nice that you could use something without having to.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
iTunes and the iPod+Video will not succeed until we can download and watch The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Only then, will it succeed.
Seriously. I would pay cash money for TDS if I could watch it on my Mac at home. And my girlfriend already records it on her DVR. That's not the point -- TDS is worth it.
Second, and slightly more seriously, I don't think people realize that it's now all high-end iPods, formerly the plain iPod and later the iPod Photo, have both the photo and video playback capability built in. That gives Apple a very diverse product iPod product line: iPod shuffle, iPod nano, and "plain" iPod. The former is really the deluxe iPod, featuring a larger color screen and 15 or 30 times storage capacity of the iPod nano. Anyone who gets one and uses iTunes will automatically have music, photo, video, and removable storage capabilities unrivaled by any other product short of a laptop computer. [Insert token arguments on screens, batteries, OS, DRM, WTF, etc.]
While I have no interest in downloading videos or the two initially offered TV shows, there is much opportunity to expand on the offerings. This may turn out like the first iPod, which I dismissed as a curious but useless toy. Instead, it turned out to be a product of entertainment culture revolution. Adding video capability to iTunes may be another stroke of genius that alters consumer culture.
-- haaz.
No, Apple is right on time. They can now go to movie studios and (better) television stations/production outfits worldwide and (maybe exclusively) liscense titles for online sales. They are the only people doing it, making money, they make the players, they are hip and multimedia, Apple is awesome, now.
This may change when other companies come out with portable video players, possibly. Not having a way to record off the TV apparently? That is actually maybe a plus not a minus as far as the TV studios see it. Now Apple has enough cachet worldwide with the music iPods that they can start going to the BBC, the Superbowl, etc.
Personally I think $2 is at the high end of what I might pay.
And I don't know if it can play to the TV or not but if it can, it rocks.
As far as the product of tv for $2, it is not hurt by "why not bittorrent" or "why not my vcr" etc. Maybe "why not my tivo" but the point is people are going to pay for convenience. Have to see whether it is still convenient if you have a possibly copyright encumbered, thing that is difficult to get off your iPod onto your vcr, etc.
Also there may be trouble with territories. For example right off the bat I thought "Great! They should liscense the BBC's new Doctor Who for U.S.!" but oh wait, it's not broadcast in the U.S. yet. Though it might be a nice way to build up a cult audience and then buy it for broadcast in the U.S. (in this way actually Apple should buy an option to get the broadcast liscense too, and the top selling foreign titles it should sell to regions where preferences seem to match).
Anyway I don't use iTunes and don't unfortunately have a new Mac. But it seems that this will migrate more towards an Amazon-like interface or some way to bring more people together talking about shows and selecting new ones previously unknown in the market.
Anyway, consider that if you didn't have the opportunity to see a show, whether it was broadcast in your area, across the country, or around the world, then it is new as far as you are concerned when you download it, if it isn't too dated. So this could be great for live bands, satellite sports, special interest groups, indie directors, all kinds of stuff.
All you need is a decent recording software/hardware solution, such as Eye-TV, to record your favorite TV shows or whatever. I don't know if Eye-TV can reduce a recording down to iPod size but I know Quicktime Pro can.
Presto! Video on the Pod!
Not to mention software to reduce DVD movies, you already own, to fit onto your video iPod. You can do this right now with newer Palms.
I downloaded and installed iTunes at the first Apple and TV story a few days ago. It is STILL cataloging my music something like 48 hours later.
I do security
Maybe for that day, yes.
I think it came out too late because the new Palm play 4gigs of music videos and it has wifi, email, web, docs, etc. http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lif edrive/
Well "first bad move" implies that Apple has not ever made any bad moves. But there are numerous bad movies Apple has made, Apple almost completely collapsed in the mid-90s. Thier licensing of 3rd party manufactures, thier game console, the refusal to switch to a protected mode operating system despite having a processor with a powerful MMU. Apple's previous attempts at making a "server".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Let's face it: Although Apple makes good stuff, they haven't done anything innovative since the original Mac. The iPod was simply an improvement on existing portable MP3 players. OSX is an improvement of BSD+OS9. Wait - what else does apple make?
Anyways, the new Video player might be good, but there just haven't been enough video players sold by other vendors to show Apple what they need to do to make their own better. Without that important data, I don't see Apple actually doing anything truely original.
Don't get me wrong, I think Apple products are good quality and very usable.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
No, it's true. Every day I watch people pay more than $1.99 for a coffee that will last maybe 15 minutes and never be seen again (except at the urinal). And some people think $1.99 is too much for a 40-minute TV show? There isn't much you can buy for $1.99 anymore.
Remember, the $1.99 includes express delivery. You can get better-looking, better-sounding episodes with extras for much less money when the DVDs come out. But that's the thing...you have to wait until they come out! If you want it now, $1.99 doesn't seem so bad.
Wasn't the ipod before the itunes store? I swore it took a while for ipod to become the portable music standard. Rio was king for a while, ivideo is the first move, these are still baby steps and I think apple knows what they are doing, they keep it fresh and extend the fad.
Whether or not selling videos for it becomes successful, it's simply a new and improved iPod, and that alone is enough.
Now, if the video capabilities successfully create a market, Apple wins even more. It doesn't make sense for them to ignore that unproven market, when it's obvious that competitors won't. If the market doesn't materialize, Apple has only lost some relatively minor development costs and a couple of bucks/unit in COG.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Maybe I'm in the minority but my TV watching has declined immensely since the late 90s. The shows are worse, the schedule doesn't work for me and the Internet provides more entertainment value. I don't pay for cable and only watch TV on the rare occasion that I need to veg. out. Then, I don't really care what's on anyway. I do miss certain shows, but that's the beauty of downloading a program for $2. It's a lot cheaper than paying monthly cable and TIVO bills. I can get stuff through bitorrent too. Whether I watch it on the iPod is almost incosequential. I may, but I'm quite happy to watch it on my computer. If subscribing to music sucks, subscribing to TV (cable/sat.) is just the same.
Surprised this has not been talked about more.
$300 for a viPod
$200 for a 9" screen it docks with in the car
$ 6 to put a few new kiddies shows on it just as you are heading out the door
Hours of bliss while driving to the parents for the holidays: Priceless
Most of the time you are going to use it just like a non video ipod, but having the feature added on does not suck.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
It's kind of like asking, 'who in their right mind would pay $.99 for a song off of ITMS when they could hook up their ipod to their computer and download the same song off P2P for free?' The answer probably is, 'A lot of people.'
This is typical Apple bashing that we see every quarter. The formula is some pundit picks out the next "threat" to iPod's dominance in the hopes that this will be the quarter that he will be hailed as the person that had the "foresight" to predict's Apple's demise and save his investors lots of money. Before it was the fact that other players that had "more features" which only served to confuse users that wanted something simple. Then it was players that had FM radio.. you know that broadcast medium that plays the same rotation of 20 songs between commercials. Then it was Microsoft's mafia of mediocre media devices, which have yet to get off the ground. Then it was the cell phone. You know, the same cell that can't keep a connection for more than 10 minutes was supposed somehow become the streaming platform that crushed the iPod. Since these pundits have had so much trouble finding another company that can destroy iPod's dominance, they must now look at the only enemy that could possibly defeat it... ITSELF. Problem is, Apple's strategy is perfectly brilliant. First off, they picked television shows instead of movies. I dismissed the video iPod at first because I agree that no one wants to watch movies on a two inch screen. BUT, catching up on a television show you missed is a completely different thing. The primary goal of downloading a television show is to get fill in information before the next episode comes. If that means watching it on a small screen so be it. With the video iPod you get to catch up on your show on the subway or during a lunch break. This is a good thing and a winner that no one else thought of doing. The biggest loser in my opinion is AOL because for years they've been sitting on a huge library of content that they could done the same thing with YEARS AGO. But instead, piracy paralysis kept them from doing anything. Now AOL has egg on its face as it watches Steve Jobs gloat on stage as the *forefather* of video download distribution. AOL could have been giving its client away for free to broadband users and used it as a storefront to download this library. But they failed to sieze the opportunity and they have no one to blame but themselves.
The number of sales for a DVD will always be higher then CDs, so the movies can make their money back on quantity sold. CDs need to charge more because the sell less. People are willing to pay as much for CDs as DVDs because the number of hours of entertainment you get from music is greater then the number of hours of entertainment from a movie. If a consumer really likes a movie, they'll watch it maybe 10 times, or 20 hours total. If a consumer really likes a CD, they'll likely play it more then 20 times.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Mr. Jobs was very careful to cover this. He said the iPod was still all about music. He knows that the video isn't going to cut it in todays HD world. He also knows that movies and TV shows are generally one watch deals, whereas music is listened to over and over again. He has even gone so far as downplaying the video aspect, not calling it the video iPod, but just the iPod. I personally would go as far as to say that video may never be popular on portable devices. Just how popular were those tiny TV's that looked like transistor radios? Not popular at all.
Sometimes I forget how big the entertainment market is and it takes articles like this to remind me.
I sit on the exact oposite side of the fence.
I can't stand that I have to pay Charter Cable $60 a month so I can Tivo reruns of the King of Queens, watch new releases of Law and Order (Regular/SVU/CI) and the occasional news and sports.
I have never seen Lost (and sadly, had hardly heard of it) but I just bought Season 1 (25 episodes for $35). I did it partly to support the medium because I have so enjoyed iTunes Music Store but also because I have wanted this for so long. If I could buy these shows (yeah, I know there are a few seasons on DVD now) but if I could buy them on-line, I would have no need - NO NEED - for cable and my $60/mo bill. I would happily spend the same money each month on $1.99 episodes (hey, that's 30 for $60!) if I was actually OWNING the content.
Oh, and about that new iPod, I think it's cool it plays video, but I mostly like it for it's slimmer size, and larger, higher resolution screen ancased in Death-Star-Remote-Control-Black.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
If they get a decent set of shows/movies available, people who don't care about live events like sports may cancel their cable and satellite subscriptions.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Who would pay $0.99 to download a song from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your radio and record that same song for free?
But wait, people do pay $0.99 to download a song from iTunes. It seems the convenience of downloading the song outweighs the inconvenience of recording it yourself.
Even more myopic, the author neglects that in the "same episode free" scenario, Apple only makes money on the initial sale of the iPod. In the "pay $1.99" scenario, Apple keeps making money after the initial sale of the iPod. Why would Apple encourage the former at the expense of the latter?
The reality is that Apple isn't the first company to produce a handheld video device. Treo can play videos. PSP can play videos. iRiver can play videos. Getting the content onto those devices isn't a walk in the park. Apple is betting that people will pay for the convenience of iTunes for video. Given their past success with iTunes and MP3s (which are relatively easy to rip) I say their chances are good.
I think everybody should go watch the Oct 12 video on the Apple website. For one thing, it has the Eminem add that was pulled. But more importantly everyone should sit down and pay close attention to what the iMac does now and how Steve compared the remote that comes with it to the MS Media Center remotes. Now is anybody really going to use a 17 inch iMac as a TV replacement? Probably not. Maybe in the kitchen, but I doubt it.
So is Steve just smoking crack here? Of course not. Now consider the Apple 30" cinema display hooked up to that remote. Things become a bit more compelling, don't they? Am I saying that Apple is going to make a Tivo? They might, but I'm guessing they won't. Here's why. The broadcasters hate Tivo. To them, Tivo means they just gave away the show AND the viewer skipped the ads. Same goes for BitTorrent, which has content producers frightened even more. Apple is offering them an alternative. Try to capture some of the Tivo/BT market by selling the show a day later with no ads. That way the broadcaster gets paid, and paid fast. The home viewer can watch the show on their Apple set top box or on the iPod. My guess is that the iTunes video store will start to grow to include older shows and eventually movies.
One thing nobody has mentioned is HD. Obviously the current iPods can't do it, but it won't be long. Apple is playing this smart, leveraging the popularity of the iPod and iTunes to establish the relationships with content producers that will get them on board.
Finally, another thing that nobody has mentioned is video in the car. If you have kids you know that a DVD player is not the best solution in the world. Not only do you have to mess with disks, but many children's disks are only about 20 minutes long and looping that over and over again on a long drive will make you want to murder Thomas, Percy, Gordan, and even Edward. What if instead you could put all your kids' shows on an iPod and hook that up to the screen in the car instead? Parents across the nation will go nuts for this and will download content just to keep themselves sane by avoiding repetition. I know that if I get one of these I'm going to rip all the Sesame Street and Thomas DVDs we have to it immediately and then park the thing in the car. And yes you can do it, just not with Apple software, for now at least.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Lets get a list going of software you use to convert/rip dvds/movies to the new IPOD format. I am a windows user so the two programs I have heard most about 'HandBrake' and 'Mac the Ripper' wont work for me. Anyone know of a GNU free OS software for windows that will rip a dvd to h.264 in one simple process? Thanks in advance. J
If I can pay $1.99 for a tv show whenever I want, why do I need a tv?
While we all see the slashdot stereotypes post their usual spiel with monotonous regularity posting reflexively whenever their favourite topic comes up, i.e. the Windows apologists "If I praise Microsoft I'll get modded down boohoo", the Linux obsessive "Linux is easy to install s/(.)\$shit/what?/g" and the Mac zealot "The Mac is faster than any PC, honest, you're just too plebian to see it", I don't think slashdot has spent enough time covering a real source of industry craptitude: The IT Industry analyst.
Given the way that they consistently manage to fail to analyse anything correctly with a percentage rate higher than pure blind guessing would get them, one must ask oneself if they have some kind of negative psychic powers? I mean, these are the people who predict that Microsoft, a company with some $50 billion in the bank and some 95% of all desktop computers might be in some obscure and terrible danger from Google, just because Google is a growing business. They might be excused for this though, because Microsoft's own CEO acts like a speed junkie on withdrawal anytime any other company gets a bit more attention that Microsoft in the press.
But these same fuckheads have consistently predicted Apple's failures and immenent downfall for some 15 years now, regardless of what product Apple releases or how well Apple's business does. These are the morons, as another poster has mentioned, who have predicted the downfall of every version of the iPod from when before there was a market to the iPod dominating 70% to 80 % of that market. It's almost as if they learned in Industry Analyst School to say that Apple is failing when having to analyse Apple's market and just repeat it over and over and over.
These are the people who will complain that the iPod is not a telephone or that something is wrong about watching videos on a small screen and who almost totally ignore the new iMac which has the typical simplicity of Apple's design applied to a home media center without the problems and unreliablity of Windows Media Center Edition. If they do have to mention it they'll allmost surely say that WinMCE has more features and that it will fail.
I would say to them: Wanna bet? How much?
Not really folly, more like bandwidth reality for most consumers.
.iso files seem to take longer (yes, they are torrents).
I suspect that most consumers are closer to low-end DSL than T1. On a saturated T1, a 300MB movie (say 20 minutes, reasonabe US TV type resolution) takes perhaps 40 minutes. I can't ever seem to saturate my link (1.5 down), so assuming that the data transfer is reasonable, lets say 3 hours. (Although, my linux
How many people are going to wait 3 hours to get broadcast quality TV? And then how many are going to be happy converting it to a crappy lower iPot resolution?
You may say, what about cable Internet users. While it is true that their is a higher peak rate, everyone gets lagged during peak (before work/school, after work/school/dinner) hours.
my $.02
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
The same people who pay $5-10 a month for program guide info so they can use their TiVo and record the show, instead of using a VCR for free?
The same people who spend $20 a season to own it on DVD (note: these same people could rip the DVD and convert to a format/resolution for use on their iPod, without having to purchase it again)?
It's not the content, it's the ease of getting the content.
Hey, here's an idea, let's pretend the iPod can't play video...
Mock Press Snippit:
CUPERTINO- This week, Steve Jobs unvieled an update to Apple Computers popular iPod, currently the world's highest selling digital music player, at a special invitation-only press event. The new models are slightly thinner than the previous generation and have larger color screens. They also boast five hours more estimated battery life, and for the first time are now available in black as well as the original white. Prices are unchanged from the previous models, with the 30GB model priced at $299.95, and 60GB for $399.95.
Yeah, that has failure written all over it.
I think the real "breakthough" with the Video iPod is that Apple is resetting the stage for how consumers should approach digital video. Until now, with PVR's, TV Tuner cards, et. al. the conventional approach has placed the burden on the consumer to understand all the different video formats (AVI, MPG, Tivo, DVR-MS, DVD, DivX, etc.), which ones work on which platforms, how to convert between formats (where allowed), how to crack formats where not allowed (DeCSS, cracking TivoToGo, etc.), and most importantly, each user is on their own to transcode the file to fit a different target device. (i.e. DVDShrink to make a full movie fit on a single-layer DVD, or downsample a video files to play on a small screen, etc.) This is a consumer nightmare and even for techies. I tried Tivo ToGo and sure, it's cool to be able to view the contents of your Tivo through web services, pull files across (slowly). But grabbing a 1 hour TV show across a fast wired lan and then transcoding it so you can view it on a PDA or other device takes forever. Even just transcoding to burn it to an official Tivo sanctioned DVD for offline viewing takes much too long. With the video iPod Apple is saying that for a nominal fee they will arrange the transcoding/encoding for you and have the file ready to download. Seems to me very similiar logic to music file sharing - instead of the hassle of Kazza, spyware, pop-ups, and the RIAA police, for a nominal fee you can download a song reliably. So in this vein, the video ipod is really about setting consumer expectations for easy-of-use and simplicity. I'm sure the content floodgates will be opening soon enough.
As somebody who does not own a television, perhaps I have a different perspective. If I bought a television, got a PVR, and bought cable, I'd be spending $50-100 a month for what? I welcome the option to buy the Simsons and a couple of other show, and avoid he rest. I would also like to be able to download movies.
MAybe this is indicative of a shift in spending on media. Paying for targeted content is always more valuable than paying for "broadcast."
By these people's same accounts the iPod is overpriced, overrated, the music format is sad, and itunes store model is flawed. The sounds of people complaining that people dont need all that space and the the battery life is terrible and locking people into the apple hardware ... yawn.
/me thinks.
I will agree that some of the ipod product line is a little too much. A few models have been released perhaps that are confusing in the marketplace -- that photo one was a mistake
The photo aspect is daring, already the the photoblog / podcast stuff seems intersting from what my existing subscriptions have yeilded.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
The difference is that in Apple's home country, ripping CDs is legal (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia) while ripping DVDs is illegal under the DMCA (MGM v. 321 Studios).
nu uh. making or selling ripping software is illegal (321 studios). possessing or personal use of such software is not, provided you are otherwise authorized to access the content (i.e. own the dvd).
after that, it's only a question of whether format-shifting falls under fair use. if i'm not mistaken that's never actually been tested in court, but with the riaa conceding that personal cd rips to ipods is fair use, it doesn't seem likely to be a problem with dvds either.
but don't worry, as a consolation prize you win... a smack up the side of the head!
What really ticks me off is that here in the UK we pay the most IN THE WORLD for songs on itunes (79p = US$1.39), and now we're being asked to fork out £1.89 (or US$3.33) for what you guys in the US can get for $1.99.
This business stinks, and I refuse to support it until we get some degree of price parity.
Not to mention we're unable to get 'lost' or 'desperate housewives' on our itunes here for a good few months yet - apple seems to be enforcing the digital divide across the atlantic all over again (see: region encoding of DVDs and *%^&£$% uncrackable apple dvd drives on their laptops etc.)
Apple is not a 'good' company - they're just like all the others, just with nice shiny aluminium exteriors instead.
And this is coming from a guy who's just bought an brand new mac mini and is thinking of getting the next powerbook revision when it comes out.
-Nano.
making or selling ripping software is illegal (321 studios). possessing or personal use of such software is not
Even if what you claim is true, then how would one make personal use of DVD ripping software if one cannot lawfully obtain it? You can't get it from an offshore server, as importing it is just as illegal as selling it.
Surely you can perform a bit-wise copy of the disc, thus avoiding circumventing CSS in the first place?
No. The CSS keys are stored on a part of the DVD that I'll call "track 0". Trouble is that track 0 of DVD-R discs sold to the public is pre-recorded before you buy the disc. In addition, the DVD CCA isn't likely to grant a license for devices that can play bitwise-copied DVD images from media other than a DVD.
http://diveintomark.org/howto/ipod-dvd-ripping-gui de/
In the 1990s, much R&D went into video-on-demand and set-top boxes. Everyone had a TV, so everyone assumed the TV would be the communication device of the future. But the market for video-on-demand never really materialized. Why not repurpose all the research for video-on-demand for my mobile phone? Sure, some operators offer some limited, gimicky video (like Verizon's VCast), but imagine a mobile phone service that combined Tivo+Netflix? Since mobile phone bandwidth is limited, maybe we can't have video-on-DEMAND today, but we could have a Netflix-like video wishlist that delivered your shows overnight into a Tivo-like "inbox" on your phone. This also lets operators make use of their network infrastructure "off-hours". Qualcomm's MediaFLO is sorta like this.
cpeterso
but as long as Flyover Country keeps voting Republican
Republican vs. Democrat has little or nothing to do with it. Case in point: President Clinton could have vetoed the Bono Act and the DMCA, forcing the bills' supporters in both houses of Congress to reveal their identities, but instead he chose to let the voice votes stand.
That's funny you said that. I am the exact opposite. If I have an idea or set an annpointment or need to write down someone's phone number, I gotta take the info down right away. Otherwise it is just GONE. This is why I carry my PDA everywhere.
Who would rent a DVD from a shop when they could record it from TV for free? Honestly what a stupid question.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
The question is not "who would pay $1.99 for an episode when they could record it for free". The question is "who will want to sit somewhere at an appointed time or figure out some complex recording device when they could just cherry-pick all the best shows and download them on demand for cheap".
You know what Apple has figured out that no-one else has? That people will pay $1.99 per episode for a good show, and ALSO buy the DVD when it comes out if they really like it.
I just wish the shows you can buy were in higher resolution, a killer buy would be the HD version of Battlestar Galactica full-res.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I got my Iaudio X5L back in May. It plays video, lets you just drag and drop videos from your harddisk, its battery lasts for 35 hours, unlike ipod's 15, it looks sleek and nice, not the standard apple ripoff, but stylish black, has better sound than the ipod, and a grahic equaliser, and a better remote... and it was about a 100$ cheaper. Oh and it also lets you connect to virtually any other device through its USB host port...
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/x5/
i mean, people by ipod just for the sake of style and image. if they only bother to look a little bit beyond that there is a host of other devices available usually with better performance and lower price. Ipod is an image brand, and that is where their sales come from. so if this is a bad product, who cares, yuppies are going to buy it anyway.
Why would Apple want anythign t do with a PVR? Isn't it far simpler to buy video and deownload it that try to come up with a good PVR UI, and have to deal with all the annoyances of real-world video input in a land fraught with Macrovision and other forms of DRM?
Nope, Apple is bypassing that whole mess and offering a simpler way to get TV - buy the shows you like as you wish. They are going to expand on that model bigtime.
While I don't see a Mac mini with video in, I do see a more home-theater oriented model with some sort of digital audio out and video cards that do a better job of decoding Mpeg4.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After reading over a lot of this thread, as well as the the original article, I've realized that at this point Apple is basically engaging people's "why not?" impulse.
"OK, i'm buying an iPod (since everyone has one)... get one that plays videos of popular shows? why not!"
After seeing why so many people have the iPod 'standard', minis and nanos and (very few) shuffles, its easy to see people who will upgrade or update to the latest 'pod simply to watch some shows and music videos and of course, porn. After the initial success, Apple's just piling it on. There's no reason to stop.
how is it a bad move adding video support at no additional charge per ipod?
My karma is getting better everyday.
Take a look at this blog posting to see what the blogosphere is saying about the video ipod. thelaggard
Apple has made several bad moves, such as the Lisa and Apple III.
Apple survived, mainly because of their culture to innovate.
As others have said better than I can, the Video iPod is probably not a bad move.
It isn't the first pocket video machine, and isn't the best.
And who needs a pocket video machine anyway?
But it is too early to label it a "bad move". The recent history of the iPod makes me think this thing will be wildly successful.
it lost firewire capability
:(
dealbreaker for me
As much as I love the ipod and Apples other products, this one fails miserably. Without the ability to burn to DVD, the low quality, and being forced to view the downloaded shows in quicktime ($30 bucks for quicktime pro to view full screen) or itunes. ( button for fullscreen mode ) I don't see great success here. They seem to have forgotten what made itunes such a success.
In terms of "sit[ting] somewhere at an appointed time" there's something to be said for the experince of watching an episode "live" with the rest of the country, being able to share it around the water-cooler the next day. New episodes of Lost are eagerly awaited and discussed live.
But in general I very much agree. I don't have cable and watch what little TV I do watch on DVD, months (or years) after the broadcast.
Who the fuck wants to watch Lord of the Rings on a 3 inch screen??
recording from TV/Cable then transfering, converting, blah blah, sounds like a watse of time. 1.99 in the right format is worth it and totally convienient. I could rip DVDs convert and transfer, but buying instantly seems way better too.
Here here.
I like the way Apple have done a lot of things, but the lemming-like parade to call them "innovative" seems to me vastly overdone.
It seems bizarre to me that people are so impressed with Apple's dressing up of existing technologies. I remember watching a news report (one of those morning shows) where someone was ranting about how cool this "new" iPod was, and how amazing it was that you could fit 10,000 songs on it. And I wondered (and still wonder) how the hell the iPod became such a "new" thing when it was pretty much exactly the same as a Creative Nomad Jukebox, which were out years before.
Don't get me wrong, the iPod is a far better product in every way, but to suggest Apple innovated in digital music is like saying Honda innovate by making good cars.
What Apple do is take existing concepts and do them... better. They also (especially thanks to the iPod) have distribution channels that aren't open to other manufacturers. Sure e-duck, goldBerg, Sanyung, etc, might have better products. But without actually searching them out, where do you find them?
Apple have a habit of not messing things up. Despite lesser technical specs, they tend to one-up the competition in usability, and in just not having aspects that suck.
As a good example, the PSP is far better for video than the new iPods, with a bigger, higher detail screen. But good luck actually getting video onto the damn thing, and there's no TV-out. And the Creative Vision is a great idea, but marred by being... well... awful. I spent the weekend playing with one, and it's very ordinary, despite the potential.
While the competition keeps playing the game with their shoes tied together, there will continue to be a market for Apple.
They don't have to innovate. They just have to continue to get things pretty much right.
The few TV downloads, which are only available in the US presently, do not represent the growth potential of video on the iPod. Rather individuals and companies using the now more easily available visual mobile technology to communicate. Think more in the terms of vbloggers, vicasting. Subscribe to a RSS based dating service with live visual "promos" of a lascivious single searching for a geek partner automatically downloaded to your iPod. City tours. Soundseeing is passé. Have commentary and visuals for museum tours with closeups of the details of a particular painting or fresque by an art historian. Instead of sending a postcard or an email from Tasmania, let them subscribe to a periodic vicast of your travels (or travails) to hear the earsplitting cries of the Tasmanian Devil while you can just make out its glowing eyes in the semi-darkness near your tent. See first hand video casts of the latest cataclysm, instead of just reading about them on a blog. Ok, the technology is not new. But iTMS makes it easier to disseminate and teh new iPod makes it easier to look at while on the move (public transport or backseat).
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
Except anyone can start a tracker.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Hrm. Wild-ass guess, but perhaps Apple wants to get into the personal video market. Not that they are going to create an Apple-branded camera, but having 60 gigs of your own home videos would be cool. And which computers are used to edit videos? Yes, Macintoshes. Hrm.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
"Finally, another thing that nobody has mentioned is video in the car. If you have kids you know that a DVD player is not the best solution in the world. Not only do you have to mess with disks, but many children's disks are only about 20 minutes long and looping that over and over again on a long drive will make you want to murder Thomas, Percy, Gordan, and even Edward. What if instead you could put all your kids' shows on an iPod and hook that up to the screen in the car instead? Parents across the nation will go nuts for this and will download content just to keep themselves sane by avoiding repetition."
You obviously have never had to deal with young children in a car for an extended period of time. Let me tell you firsthand: On those long trips, it doesn't matter if you've dragged your entire CD collection and every DVD in the Disney/Dreamworks/Nickeoldeon/Hit! Entertainment library -- the kids are going to latch on to one thing and want to replay it for hours on end. The rest of the stuff ends up wasting space, whether it's in your glove box or on your iPod.
And before you think of outwitting the kids by bringing only that one disc on your trip and leaving everything else behind, that's when they outfox you by demanding something you didn't bring along...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I was thinking "iPorn" would be appropriate.
Are we going to see Porncasting as the new trend?
Apple didn't introduce a "Video iPod" to their existing line-up. Matter of fact, they didn't introduce a "Video iPod" at all.
Now, before you want to beat me down with an argument in semantics, let's take for granted that when I speak of product introductions, branding and positioning are precisely part of definitions here.
Let's put it this way... If Apple came out with some $600 Video iPod into or on top of an existing triad of flagship iPods (as opposed to the Nano and Shuffle).
Instead, they replaced their entire triad of "small, medium or large" flavors of the standard iPod with a 30GB and 60GB iPod--both having video capability. They are not branding these as "Video iPods" in the same way they did not brand the iPods as "Audio iPods".
This is actually an ingenious branding strategy because it doesn't pigeonhole exactly WHAT the iPod is. It leaves the definition flexible... so, a year from now, it'll be taken for granted that an "iPod" is the standard iPod with video and audio capability.
When you risk product cannibalization or bringing in new technologies alongside existing ones, the alternative is to simply integrate the new features into the existing lines that you're going to have out there... but the concern is how that will affect customer interest if they're forced into having no choice.
However, Apple's already clearly answered that... the 30 and 60GB iPods with video support come in at the same price points as the small and medium capacity iPods that preceded them. $299 is the starting point.
Granted, maybe the $299 iPod has slightly less capacity than its non-video capable predecessor (of this I'm not sure, but if anyone can confirm or deny... please do).... but it's not like customers have a choice between a higher capacity non-video iPod and a lower capacity video iPod. If they're going to consider an iPod at all, and they will, $299 is going to be a reasonable price point for entry when weighed against the features of the Shuffle, the Nano and the 60GB flagship iPod.
And if the point is to be made that they have a choice to go elsewhere, the answer to that is: Yes and no.
If they're price or feature shoppers, then they had just as many alternatives to a $300 iPod before the video feature came along.
If they're culture/brand shoppers, then they've only had one choice and continue to have only one choice... Apple. There's no other digital music player brand that's even remotely close to Apple in terms of its cultural status and appeal. It could be argued that there's no other brand, period, that comes remotely close to Apple today in terms of the "it" factor.
I'm not defending that type of consumer mentality, I'm just saying it exists, the market research observations support the notion that people do respond to such factors.
But let's get to a second issue here... aside from why people would buy it... Why is Apple introducing this feature now? Well, a lot of what Apple's done is cutting edge... in the sense that they've brought out a lot of features that nobody currently uses. But is that a reason to not bring out a feature?
If every company decided their feature introductions on the basis of prior use, then nothing new would ever be introduced. So, somewhere they have to take a chance. Well, by bringing the video feature into their models without actually adding them asa "top-end" option, new buyers are basically going to have the feature there whether they want it or not... but the price they'll have paid won't be that much different from the previous models that didn't have it.
This type of feature introduction often has the effect of creating demand where none existed before. Like mutations in evolutionary biology that occur regardless of need, eventually the market will find a usefulness for the feature... It might be podcasting, it might be $1.99 episodes on the go, or home movies... It might
So, if you own a macrovision decoding box that was purchased pre-DMCA, are they now considered illegal to use?
Yes. "Video clarifiers" designed explicitly to defeat Macrovision's system were illegal to make, use, and sell even before the DMCA. When Macrovision patented gain-control copy distortion signals, it also patented the obvious methods of removing such signals from the video signal.
Get thee to an accountancy!
The whole point of the video iPod was not to sell lame TV shows the day after they air on ABC -- it was to set an upper bound on what the record companies could demand for an iTunes download. If 28 minutes of network TV can be downloaded for $1.99, the argument that a new Britney Spears pop tune is worth $1.99 gets shot to %$#@! If TV executives are willing to let 28 minutes of their content be downloaded for $1.99, then the record companies offering 180 seconds of Britney are getting away with murder.
Jobs now has a way to whipsaw the record company executives against the network TV executives. Since network TV consumption has dropped rapidly (especially among the iPod generation), anything that creates a new revenue model for network TV is good news. TV executives will line up in favor of this new revenue model that favors them. Record company executives, who already have collected bad press by suing their customers, will not be able to stand up this new assault.
I found there is an interesting software called PQ-DVD for iPod Video, which can convert DVD, Tivo, DivX and all other video files to iPod. I just downloaded the trial version. Looks like it works extremely good and very easy to use.