| The video-enabled iPod: Much more than just watching TV on the go | | Date Created: 15 Oct, 2005, 09:25 AM |
 I've been waking up early of late - which either means I am not getting out enough at night, the days are getting longer here in the Southern Hemisphere or I am depressed, or all of the above!
But seriously, when this happens, I usually fire up NetNewsWire and look for the latest news feeds and podcasts.
Naturally, the video-capable iPod is all over the news, and I was particularly intrigued with the coverage given it in a BBC story here.
I was intrigued because finally mainstream media is asking members of my profession for their viewpoints about the meaning of the video-capable iPod.
So here are the quotes I want to comment on:
"Psychologist and usability expert Tom Stewart thinks the key drawbacks with telly-on-the-go are that you can't do other things at the same time, like walking, and it's a passive experience.
"You can watch a television programme and you don't feel as engaged as you do listening to a radio programme, when you feel like a participant," he says. "A good DJ makes you feel like they're talking to you. Video is a more one-way experience."
Despite that, he predicts the new iPod could be a breakthrough, due to Apple's usability, its link with iTunes and the breadth of content on offer. But scepticism remains - and in some well-informed quarters.
Professor Michael Bull, a leading expert on iPod culture based at the University of Sussex, says people with TV on their mobile phones are mainly young men accessing either reality TV, which earns the telephone companies revenue from voting, and porn.
"It strikes me as more a minority sport whereas music is universal," he says. "Rather like mobile phones, which have two main applications - speaking, followed by texting - everything else is a niche market and probably with iPods it will be the same.
"Even if you're on an aeroplane the batteries mean you can't watch something throughout a long flight.
"I've mixed feelings and yet to be convinced that it will take off in a meaningful way, mainly because people have to be static to use it."
Bull is well-known for his academic research into the music-based iPod phenomenon, and has published books for a general readership on the subject. Stewart is unknown to me, but I Googled him here, and he is well-qualified for the BBC to interview him as an expert in human-computer interaction.
All I can refer to is what has ended up in print on the BBC website. Having been interviewed many times by journalists, I know that what I end up reading is not necessarily all that I discussed in an interview, and often a balanced and reasoned argument is rendered one-sided depending on what the editor decides makes better copy. It's not that one is being quoted incorrectly, but more that one's well-rounded arguments have been split - what suits the story is included, the other stuff is excluded.
Which is why I advise colleagues to record their side of their conversation when interviewed (or if recording a live radio or TV show in the studio they take their own recorder, audio or video).
So let's work with what is in print.
The thrust of the BBC article is to ask why the video-capable iPod and its TV show content via iTunes will "work" when small TVs of yore didn't (see above picture).
To compare the the two seems feeble-minded to me, although the BBC article taken in its entirety walks around the subject quite well, exposing a variety of ideas and opinion worthy of your attention.
But let's be blunt. The video-capable iPod is not a TV set in the conventional sense. It is the first example of an Apple portable time-shifting multimedia hardware device, integrating with one-click with a multimedia storehouse to download and attend to programs-of-choice.
And those programs are sourced from mainstream media and amateurs (so far) like podcasters and videocasters/bloggers. If podcasting is viewed as a threat to commercial radio, then a video-enabled iPod is just one more reason to turn off the radio and watch the same videos of music one listens to on radio. And if you want to give your eyes a rest or save battery power, turn down the brightness to black and just listen to the same songs. One pays a double premium for this extra facility of course, but we're talking half the price of the cheapest Starbucks coffee here, and appealing to an under-24 audience.
I want to diasgree with the idea that radio is interactive and video on an iPod is not. Most people listen to radio while interacting with other things or activities.
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 It's not like the pre-TV days, when the family would sit by the radio and do little else (perhaps knit) while transfixed listening to radio dramas, book readings, and live music performances, as well as localised news (pre-Reuters and AAP).
Now we listen to radio (and the DJs who allegedly talk to us) while doing others things requiring greater attention - driving, washing up, reading, playing with the dog, walking and thinking, etc.
I am betting too that more and more people are watching TV while multitasking, an observation which will increase as more more adopt wi-fi broadband and laptop computers allowing the TV to operate in the background more and more. Until, that is, the TV experience is so compelling on a home theatre, that it demands our full attention to justify the cost.
That might be reserved for DVDs and movies, but weekly programming of hour long TV shows filled with advertisements 17 minutes of the hour?
Give me my ad-free Bit Torrented files anytime, which I can watch anytime, anywhere on my Powerbook. With the video-capable iPod I can leave my Powerbook at home and watch the show of my choice at my liberty. That is not TV as we know it know. It's using the media first shown on TV to attend to it on another medium. When I need to get off the train on my morning commute, I pause it and come back to it later.
Now, with Apple providing the first wave of TV programming via a legal download model, I have a choice. Do I wait what may be days for a 350MB torrent file to come through (generally high quality and what I wanted compared to the vagaries of peer to peer music illegal) downloading, or spend 30 minutes downloading a 200MB file for $1.99?
This is a disposable $1.99, by the way, half the price of a chai or latte, and one which I get to keep. It's mine. Will I watch it again in the same way that I can listen to music over and over again over a lifetime? I might watch it once more, maybe twice.
What's the bet a small black market commences once some bright spark unblocks the DRM and sells collections of TV shows on eBay, delivered on DVD, despite its illegality?
For $1.99, do I care that I won't watch it again? Weekly, I go the the local two dollar shop and buy a toy for Shrek to play with. If it lasts three days before he destroys it in his pleasure, I am happy. That's the price of dog ownership which I am happy to comply with, given the pleasure he gives me.
In the scheme of things, most of us will find $1.99 to either sample fare we've heard about but never seen just to try it out. Or we'll download it because we are fans of the show and the mp4 is a collectible that fans... well, collect.
In an earlier entry, I wrote how I had given my local TV cable company away in favour of Bit Torrent. I save $1200 a year, which in Aussie dollars would give me about 500 shows or music videos. 500 hour shows is 10 hours a week roughly. I don't currently watch 10 hours a week of TV.
Some of my favourite shows are already available on the net through commercial means, and with the release of the iTunes Video store more will happen, including material from the BBC.
This is not your Dad's TV is the point I want to make. It is a younger generation's medium, tied to their favourite entertainment which they can switch on or off at liberty, and without advertisements every 12 minutes as the model now demands.
Now some will argue that the video-capable iPod will just add to the woes of an attention-deficit disordered population of youngsters. But others will find uses for the same iPod (see what Drexel U. is up to) which will give more evidence for how technology always leads a double life - what its creators intended as a solution to an agreed-upon problem, and an innovation for questions we didn't know to ask.
Watch how quickly the discussion will shift from traditional media once the shock of the new is digested, to new innovative uses. Yes, yes, other mp4 players have been around with bigger screens and better battery life and yada yada yada. But they had no content of significance.
By turning our attention to video on the go, even if it is by "virtue" of shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost, it captures the public eye, and says, "You MUST look here to see the future."
From there, we enter a new zeitgeist, and that's the importance of the whole widget approach Apple has extended to video on the iPod. With built-in videoconferencing in the domestic iMac G5 which easily enables a few clicks to upload one's own videocast (watch for further .mac developments to assist this process soon), Apple has brought video production to the masses. iMovie was the forerunner, now the iPod/iTunes combo extends ability of Apple to help its users have "the power to be their best".
Those entering college this year were just a few years old when Apple first coined the phrase in its marketing. How ironic that this group will enjoy the results of this Apple philosophy using new products they'll soon take for granted as part of their educational tools. |
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