Underwhelming

What's my reaction to today's announcements by Apple concerning a video iPod and video in the iTunes Music Store?

Underwhelming.

Buying videos in the iTunes Music Store makes very little sense right now. $2 music videos...whoop-dee-do...Fairly low res TV episodes that are oh-so-easy to Tivo (and aquire by other means)...whoop-dee-do.

Video in iTunes kinda makes sense (as a video organizing app), but the execution sucks. Open a movie and it starts playing in the album art area which is located in a tiny box in the corner of the screen. If you set it to play video in its own window the video keeps playing audio in iTunes after you close the window...That makes no sense whatsoever. I think MS figured this stuff out in 1996 or so...iTunes should play videos the same way music videos work in the music store: Put them in the main pane.

Even more disturbing is the fact that iTunes does not recognize AVIs in any way. That's like not supporting MP3s. 99% of the content I'd like to organize is in the form of AVIs rather than Quicktime. I know Apple likes to imagine that QT is the last video format on Earth, but not at least providing transcoding fascilities for AVIs seriously limits the usefulness of iTunes as a video organizer...Of course, the probably reason the left transcoding out is that it's is deadly slow (compared to simply converting a song from one format to another) and AVI transcoding facilities would allow pirated content to be easily put on the video iPod.

The video iPod unit itself is also underwhelming. Next to the PSP's breathtaking 4.3 inch widescreen LCD, the iPod video's 4:3, 2.5 inch display is old hat. The aspect ratio tells me that Apple is not too serious about portable video right now...Rather, I think this is a panic move by Apple to get something into the portable video market before it's too late.

I can't accept the explanation that Apple is doing this simply because everyone expected a video-capable iPod...No, they have far more urgent reasons for getting into portable video.

First, the cellular providers are all ready to start streaming full-frame video content to phones. Portable, on demand video is a scary prospect for Apple because compared to streaming, the online music store model sucks. There's no need for people to be stuck with giant DRMed music files sucking up space on their hard drives when it gets streamed right to their phone.

The second reason is the Sony PSP and it's UMD video format. As a competitor to today's video iPod, the PSP is an above average hobbyist's toy...If you invest in a large memory card, you can fill it with videos you transcode on your PC and transfer over. But that's not what concerns Apple...The UMD movie format must scare them half to death.

Think about it...What was the last portable video format you saw? Unlike music, we've never had a real portable video medium until UMD. Not only do UMD movies look good, and work well, but the MPAA didn't flinch at approving it because it's the natural portable extention of DVD...No Hollywood content sitting on hard drives waiting to be cracked open.

Sure, carrying around discs does lack the slickness of the iTunes Music Store, but how slick would the store be when you're downloading 400MB+ video files? Consider that UMDs store the video at full DVD resolution, which undoubtely means that a future device will allow them to be played back at full res...How will Apple compete when Sony's format already has 1GB+ movies?

The other thing that bugs me is how we went from iTunes 5 to iTunes 6 in a handful of weeks. Something tells me that all the iTunes work was done for some time, but something (perhaps legal, perhaps iPod design related) delayed the release of the version of iTunes with the video support. It makes sense considering how barren iTunes 5 was in the new features department.