nutbehindwheel

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Podunkadunk

I was surfing through the news today when I saw an article on PRNewswire talking about the new video iPod from Apple. It jogged my memory about a conversation I had with a few friends about it and other Personal Media Players that are on the market now.

The company basically stated a few things that Apple could do to improve their new product. They listed a bigger hard drive, a bigger screen, and make improvements on the video technology for the device itself. They also commented that Apple needs to make a greater effort to get on the good side of the movie industry.

Now, if you've ever heard Steve Jobs talk about the music industry, you know he pretty much despises them and the greed pervasive throughout the record industry. One of the reasons he started iTunes was to attempt to break it. I think he's still got a long ways to go and the road isn't getting easier now with the addition of the movie and TV industry on the bandwagon.

The level of greed and utter evil in the record industry is outright insane. If you think you're supporting your favorite artist by buying their records, you're not. You're feeding the fat record moguls. The record managers complain that the few cents that an artist see for each iTunes song sale is too much! They want to see the same percentages they get from CD sales, which would reduce the cut for the artists to a single cent in most cases. (Go see their concerts!)

And you can't forget the movie industry in all this. They're the new gorilla that Apple has to deal with. Jobs says he wants to use it to break the movie industry in a similar way that iTunes has changed the recording industry. And wouldn't you know it, as soon as Apple starts selling their videos on iTunes, the movie industry immediately comes back and says that the current pay structure for DVDs is too cheap to apply to iTunes video. Would that be greedy??? Heck yeah...

This brings me to my first issue with the video iPod. I know that Apple really isn't trying too hard to innovate with it, it's more of an evolutionary step for them. It is smart business sense as he probably knows it will take a while for the movie industry to buckle a bit as they see more and more people demand and pay for digital content when it's priced right.

Personally, I would love to see the iPod have the bigger screen and larger storage and better video implementation. I want to be able to take TV shows and movies that are on my computer and drop them right into my iPod with a big nice screen like the Sony PSP without having to use Quicktime or some other program alter the videos for playback.
I think that's a bit of wishful thinking, but I think it's a nice feature to have with the iPod, even if I don't use it frequently. Once podcasting becomes more video oriented, I think it'll make me more interested in buying. Especially if the price and looks and portability at least stay as good as they currently are.

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