“I saw some interesting theories why three’s no video iPod. I won’t get into the argument about whether consumers want mobile video. There’s clearly a segment that does and I won’t debate that side of the argument. The argument I read today goes since Steve Jobs owns Pixar he doesn’t want illegal movies ripped. Perhaps. But that’s not the reason. It’s because unlike music, it’s illegal to rip a DVD to your hard drive, Pixar or otherwise. Simple. No same company wants to get into that legal issue with the studios and provide those tools. Not Apple. Not Microsoft. In fact, the reason MediaCenter Extenders won’t stream DVDs from your MCE to the device is that in order to do so they need to be decrypted to send the stream. That’s illegal too. Should it be? Of course not, but at the moment, it is. The only other source of legal video content is recorded TV and Apple at the moment has no interest in playing in that market. Should they? Perhaps, but that’s another story,” Michael Gartenberg writes in his Jupiter Research weblog.
Full article here.
From a pure marketing perspective, it makes more sense to squeeze every bit of PR juice possible from each incremental improvement rather than to blow it all at once. Sergei Bubka broke the pole vaulting record many, many times, but only by a centimeter or two each time. It was clearly in his best interests to select the meet at which he would break the record so as to maximize his income based on the bonus awarded by the event promotors. Apple is doing the same thing, releasing incrementally improved iPods sequentially, at opportune moments to keep the attention focused where they want it, making the most of each new press release.
arygaetu… love your ideas man.. it would be killer to see a wide acceptance of images for this kind of usage… whereas before it would be.. print up this map and take it with you.. it would be awesome to be on a bike trail, listening to music, and maybe to stop, check out the iPod Photo.. check the map..and go from there…
good stuff
isn’t a lot of this stuff, mike and arygaetu, already in a lot of handhelds? Palm and so forth?
Mr. Gartenberg is not entirely correct. I don’t know exactly what the law is, but I’m in the AV biz and I know of several “computer” (Linux based, I believe) boxes being made by manufacturers and marketed as media servers on which you can legally rip a copy of your DVD for streaming to any of the access points that are part of the system. Pretty amazing systems, actually, but incredibly expensive. I know this could be done on a Mac, and for much less. Check out the product MAXX by AMX. [url=http://www.amx.com]http://www.amx.com[/url]
I know you can play some .mov files in iTunes. You only get sound of course. Just be intersting to see what would happen if you tried playing a .mov on the new pod. Just to see what happens. Some one will crack this.
There is plenty of home DV just as there are plenty of home photos that folks would put on an iPod Video.
In fact, home DV movies converted to MP4 would be fine on that small screen – it is about the res you see them on the web anyway.