Video Star, Volume II
Continued from 'Will Video Kill The Radio Star?'….
Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things: Ride on the train, exercise, shop. People like to multi-task with their music.
Video, whether short-form like TV or long-form like movies, isn't like that. Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over. That's a totally different interaction model than music.
So there's basically zero reason for video to be portable. You're not going to carry it around with you. You're going to watch it at home.
Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.
So why's Apple off negotiating with record labels, television broadcasters and Hollywood movie studios, then? For the likely answer, I'll turn to a snippet of another ASOT post in the same discussion thread:
Everybody's wrong about the video iPod thing. A video iPod would be a dumb idea for lots of reasons, some technical, some psychological. If you want to know where we're going with video playback, look not to the iPod but to its considerably less famous little brother, AirPort Express.
ASOT hints, and I concur, that Apple's migrating its hardware and software to a usage model reminiscent of the one that Microsoft's executing on with Windows XP Media Center Edition; content is stored on a digital media server and streamed from there to 'dumb' connected devices elsewhere in the home. The first-generation Airport Express was an audio-only device, but Belkin and Christie Digital have proven that it's possible to wirelessly, reliably stream 480-line resolution video around the home. High-res video over CAT5 is a no-brainer. And the powerline networking folks are still, depending on your perspective, 'plugging' (ahem) away towards eventual success or tilting at windmills.
If I lived on the public transit-rich East Coast, say, or in Europe or Asia, instead of in car-crazed California, I might be more excited about a video iPod. Then again, I rarely drive, instead I spend a lot of time on Amtrak, but that's still a more laptop-friendly environment than a subway where a small-screen-and-keypad device would be more appropriate. I also admit that the fact that I barely watch television doesn't help my enthusiasm; I think the video iPod concept is better suited for half-hour TV sitcoms than it is for several-hour Hollywood movies. So maybe I'm not the target market. But given the underwhelming market response to portable video players of all types to date, I don't think I'm in the minority. In-Stat agrees.
Skepticism aside, I'll be further exploring the video-on-the-go concept in the coming months. Content sources include recorded television shows, ripped DVDs (unencrypted, of course), and clips from MSN Video Downloads and Sony. My Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone plays back WMV-encoded video, as does my Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC, and Dell's loaned me a VGA resolution-capable Axim X50v. I've also got a Creative Zen Portable Media Center, and a Sony Playstation Portable with a 1 GByte Sandisk Memory Stick PRO Duo (which I'm dumping MPEG-4 video onto as I type this, in fact, preparing for Sunday's flight to Siggraph in Los Angeles).
Your thoughts? I'm very curious to get perspectives both from those of you who haven't yet taken the portable video player plunge, and from those of you who have (and, in this case, from both those who are still regularly using such devices and those whose players are collecting dust in desk drawers and on shelves). Happy weekend, all!
