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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?
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.
>|<*:=
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.
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.
....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
What fucking planet do you live on?! Portable video players have been around for years!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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
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).
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?
"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.
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"
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.
"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.
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?"
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."
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.
Nothing like low-res porn on a 2-inch screen to get the wife all hot and bothered.
Dude, that just means you look big in comparison.
This is not a losing situation.
The two are entirely different beasts. The price of one has nothing to do with the price of the other.
Realize that a CD of whatever band costs about as much as a DVD of some feature film. The costs of making the content for the CD are *vastly* smaller than the costs of making a feature film, the CD has MUCH less content (and most of it is filler) and there are usually not a lot of extras. Yet it costs... $20. The costs of making a feature film are huge - $100 million isn't uncommon nowadays. Some of them have a huge amount of extra content, and if it's a good movie, it isn't like some scenes are just filler, as on a CD. Yet it costs... $20.
I'm sure Apple did some heavy focus group stuff and found that people would pay more for a tv show, but not that much more. My guess is a lot of it has to do with replayability. I can listen to a song quite a few more times than I will watch a movie. So that's why I would pay almost as much for music as I would for a DVD.
But, my whole point is, other than them both being "entertainment" it isn't like they're actually all that similar from a marketing standpoint.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
You're not paying attention. The nano replaced the mini. The Photo got merged to the main iPod line. There is no separate iPod video -- instead, there's a new main iPod that happens to do video.
Apple's current lineup is three models:
iPod shuffle
iPod nano
iPod
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!
Apparently the RIAA has mod points on Slashdot.
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?
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.
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."
...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
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.
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
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.
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."
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
Perhaps: more likely everyone "tech savvy" will download video files for the iPod using the same "various methods" that they use currently for music. The mass market will buy. (AKA: The kids will dl with bitx, and the parents will purchase.)