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iPods Becoming Entrenched In Major League Baseball
DreadfulGrape writes "ESPN.com reports on how video iPods are being used increasingly by baseball players to study opponents' game footage. In fact, Houston Astros' pitcher Jason Jennings credits the device with improving his game last summer." Jennings says,
"Eventually, more than two-thirds of the roster had piled on and turned this team into baseball's official iSquad. Every player gets his own custom set of videos loaded onto his personal iPod, sorted by date, hitter, pitcher and opponent — and updated every week or so."
Queue up a thousand replies saying "Why are they using iPod? The is way better! Get a life, folks. Apple finally has marketshare of something. If the story was about Kleenex, would you complain that Scott Tissue was way better? Jeez.
This is nothing that you couldn't do with any portable media player
I agree with what much of what you say, and it's probably something that I could do with any portable media player, but, perhaps, Apple's investment in usability is what enables the 'dumb jock' to use portable video.
Before I got an iPod I had written up a set of perl scripts to manage my music on an Archos MP3 player to a level I felt was convenient. Now I use iTunes. Most folks can't write perl scripts.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Finally a useful application of iPods! What? Baseball? Oh.
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By any chance, do you have 2 sisters, 3 brothers & a maid ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Airplane seats are already getting iPod connectors instead of generic connectors....
Maybe part of the problem is that the electronics industry still has their foot up their ass, and after 30+ years of portable media devices, there are still no standard connectors. Every device has it's own connector for charging (which is totally unnecessary today - a small connector that provided 5v and 1000 mv would be able to power almost all portable media devices).
And for the audio output, while most use the 1/8" phono plug, even this is non-standard, with some devices using the 1/16" plug, and phones all using totally different schemes for the four contact points in those plugs - meaningin you can't take a Morotola stereo headset and use it with a Treo and have both earphones work, even though they have the exact same form factor.
I don't blame the airline industries and auto industries for deciding to support only the iPod. It's kind of a "Hey asshats, if you're going to keep being retarded and uncooperative with eachother, then we will just support this guy who has 75% of the market anyway".
Ok, let me give this a try. It differs from using a phone with a camera because the picture quality is better and you can connect the iPod to a TV screen and still watch it without the picture looking like crap. It differs from using a real camera, something major league baseball has been doing for years, in that with the real camera will usually need you to be in a specific location like a film room to view it. The iPod would allow the players to view the film on the plane when they are travelling or in the hotel room.
I don't see what good a plain old iPod will do them. They won't even be able to connect to the spy satellites.
No jokes, please
A joint statement has been released by several hundred MLB players in which they profusely apologize to the public, as they've only just learned how tedious baseball is to watch.
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Just having the option gives the consumer an opportunity to do lasting damage, and possibly souring the experience for them, putting off other potential buyers. Soon the iPod would get the reputation of being too hard for all but the computer-savvy, and it would become just another mp3 player.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is not News and the iPods aren't nearly as popular as ESPN makes it seem. I know for a fact that only the small amount of teams who have digital video systems (Red Sox) have the means to convert and load all the Video. These Digital Video systems are not the standard accross the league and most players get video of their at bats/ pitching sequences on DVD for road trips. However, the popularity of iPods as music/video players among MLB teams can not be argued.