Will Video Kill The Radio Star?*

The long-winded rumour mill fixated on whether or not Apple is poised to launch a video-capable version of the iPod is reaching yet another crescendo. Every time a video- and Apple-related bit of news gets leaked, the blog and email debate surges. Perusing my bulging 'blog posts to be written' Outlook folder full of emails and RSS feeds, I find the following notable past catalysts:

• In early February, a job posting from Apple sought a programmer with "experience working with embedded systems" who would in part be "responsible for rapidly developing memory and performance optimized software solutions to complex problems". Specifically, Apple was looking for someone with "ARM7 RISC processor experience", the ARM7, of course, being the CPU core in iPods.
• In early April, Apple signed a contract with Alphamosaic, a UK-based division of Broadcom and a developer of low power consumption-optimized audio, graphics and video chips.
• iTunes 4.8, released in early May, supports Quicktime-enabled video playback (and contains hidden hooks for Windows Media Video support), and Apple began selling bundled videos through its online music store.
• A widely-quoted article at Ars Technica, which appeared earlier this month, predicted that Apple would use Intel's XScale CPUs in future video-capable iPods (I had, ahem, made the same suggestion over a month earlier).
• Last week, the Wall Street Journal and other sources reported that both Apple and Microsoft were intensely negotiating with content owners for resale rights to music videos, TV broadcasts, Hollywood movies and other video content, and
• The latest rumour, just two days old, is that the video iPod will be based on a Sharp SoC.

Connect the dots, and the picture looks pretty compelling. Or does it? I'm not saying Apple's NOT doing a video-capable iPod (strictly speaking, after a little Linux-based hacking you can already play video on an iPod). But given that Apple's long had access to the building blocks it'd need to do a video iPod, yet hasn't pulled the trigger, I conclude that the company's approaching the project with justifiable pragmatism. The iPod Photo wasn't a rip-roaring success, exemplified by its recent repositioning which kept the colour screen but dropped 'Photo' from the name; why would a video iPod do any better? In fact, I'd argue it'd probably do worse (although probably better than the iPod flea).

I was skeptical of the portable video concept when Creative Labs talked to me about their Portable Media Center prior to the 2004 CES, and I haven't warmed to the idea since then. Part of my objection was (and remains) the price; Creative's 20GB player is still $499 (the same price it was when it started shipping last September); it's possible to buy an entry-level laptop computer for only slightly more than that nowadays, fercryinoutloud, and portable DVD players are less than $100! Why would I pay $500 for something with a diminutive hard drive, a dinky screen and limited functionality?

The other big factor in my skepticism is the fundamental discrepency between an audio-only an audio-plus-video usage experience. I found a particularly eloquent explanation of this difference in a recent Slashdot posting from someone with the cryptic username As Seen On TV. From early February until late May, and not since then (at least under this particular username), this prolific Slashdot poster positioned himself as an Apple employee (some folks believed he was actually Steve Jobs) and provided an abundance of refreshingly frank well-thought-out commentary on the company's current products and future plans. The first part of ASOT's abbreviated post that I've quoted below discussed technical issues, which are solveable with a big-enough RAM cache (at the tradeoff of extra expense, power consumption, etc). But the usage model difference discussed in paragraph three and beyond is the key, to me:

And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.

(How can we do photos, then? Easy. Photos are even smaller than songs. And unlike video, people often do want to carry photos around with them. Keep reading.)

Continued with 'Video Star, Volume II'….

*A bit of trivia, for those of you who don't recognize the origins of this post's subject line. It's the title of a song from a now-defunct group called the Buggles, and holds the distinction of being the first video played when MTV launched on August 1, 1981.