Note on iPod Video Player: Ignore Steve

Were you afforded the opportunity to gaze upon the earth and it’s denizens in the moments before the KT boundary was formed and asked to predict what might happen after the Dinosaurs went from masters of the planet to scary fossils for kids you might, understandably, predict a re-emergence of megafauna. It would be a natural thing to assume that giant animals would again evolve to fill the niches vacated by the slowly mineralizing dinosaurs. In some ways your predication would be correct Balaenoptera musculs is the largest animal to ever inhabit earth but more generally the prediction would be wrong. There are no 25 foot tall predators with Ginsu knives for teeth roaming the planet and, except for daytime talk show hosts, there is a positive dearth of huge land-based plant eaters. Which serves to illustrate a point: predicting the evolution of a phylum or a product may seemingly be an easy task but, in reality, the exercise is burdened by a massive number of variables. Which is another way of saying there are a lot of reasons to forget about the video iPod but there are still a few reasons to think one will show up. Sound waffly? Well the first step in realizing that accurate prediction is beyond your ken is admitting you have a problem. Hi I’m Chris.

To anyone witha cranium and three interconnected gray cells a video iPod seems like the most natural product evolution of all time. The path is simple: first music, then files, then pictures and finally video. A visual representation might look as follows:

Yet it must be noted that the iPod remains bereft of obvious “improvements.” For example: it would take all the engineering skill of a drunken koala bear to add an FM tuner to the iPod, yet you’ll find no direct method of listening to the radio on your iPod. You desire recording capabilities? Again you’ll need a third party solution. The list continues but the point is clear: just because a feature is an “obvious enhancement” doesn’t mean that it will show up in an iPod. A situation that is actually a bit refreshing in a world seemingly dominated by marketing via the “features” list. Sure a refrigerator with a built-in TV is no big engineering feat and it does make the list of features one line longer so the telly fridge is a no-brainer right? Well there exists a fine line between “Because we can” and “because we should” and the refrigerator/TV combo erases that line faster than Rick James erased white lines at an after party. At this point it is tempting to dissect every reason you won’t see a video iPod in an effort to run up the word count but the more reader friendly method of illustrating the inherent problems is with a list.

Steve Jobs said so:
Yes Steve said there were no plans for a video iPod and he cited lack of demand as the reason. Steve says a lot of things. When Steve Jobs say things like there won’t be a flash based iPod he means: “Until we can make a kill off a technology X Apple won’t be entering the market.”

Small Screen:
The iPod has a screen that is too small for legit photo viewing and way too small for movie watching. Yet PSP devotees seemingly watch movies with the PSP’s slightly larger (though relatively tiny) screen. Still the number of people who buy the PSP for movie playing capabilities is a small segment, the PSP is all about games.

Active participation:
Movies are something you have to actively watch, music can be merely a background activity.  One, for example, can listen to a baseball game as background noise with emotional impact but a movie necessarily occupies two of your senses. Well, unless it is a Gigli (you’re better served with the sound off).

Time constraints:
It takes a few minutes to hear a song and an hour and a half to watch a movie. Unless you are willing to watch a move in stops and starts (you could do this with The Aristocrats but not with, say, The Usual Suspects) you won’t fully appreciate the movie.

The PSP is too good:
The PSP is as hot as the iPod (or was until the nano was introduced) and thus the market for folks who want to watch full length movies on little screens is already well served by something just as hip and as cool as the iPod. What is the point of entering a market that already has the perfect device for the masses? (A question Dell has never asked with their DJ line.)

The HD conundrum:
This was, according to Steve Jobs, supposed to be the year of High Definition. Well it hasn’t exactly panned out. The market is not saturated with hi-def televisions and consumer priced camcorders. HD broadcasts are still the exception and not the norm etc, etc. Yet HD is coming and coming with HD movies are fantastic file sizes. A two-hour movie will eat up (according to Blu-Ray.com) 25 GB of disk space.* So a mythical 100 GB iPod with video capabilities will hold roughly four movies, not exactly enough space to house an even a very modest collection.

But for all the reasons to think a video iPod is still a long way off there are reasons to think it is just around the corner. Intrepid folks have found hidden video buttons in iTunes software and the iTunes store does offer videos on occasion. More generally Apple has a nifty codec for both HD and mobile video playback. Surely the market for a tiny video player is already served but the market for a video library on the go that interfaces with your TV hasn’t really been exploited. So the question we are left with, and perhaps it is the same question we really began with: is who believes Steve? He may dismiss the notion of video iPod in the near term but when the technology catches up to the technical requirements and Apple can devise a good user experience you can expect Steve to jump into the game with both feet (and an agreement with the movie studios).

*According to Apple’s numbers a two-hour movie encoded with the H.264 codec will eat up 7 GB of space. Smaller than Blu-Ray’s file size but not small enough to store a very large collection on an iPod anytime soom.