Posted on Wednesday 12 October 2005
If you don’t know by now, then you probably don’t care…but Apple announced the next big thing in the iPod world today. That would be the 30 GB and 60 GB iPods with video capabilities which you can now order. Leigh Ann and I decided awhile back that an iPod was what we planned to get ourselves for Christmas this year (yes, Mom and Dad, this is what we’re looking at…if you don’t have any ideas for gifts for us, you can give us some money for this if you want 
).
Eric Mohler and I talked about the utility of video iPods a few months ago. I think the main conclusions we came to were:
- It’s quite different from audio because video requires a lot more concentration. It’s no longer a background activity, like music, but becomes your primary activity (Damon could probably give the correct HCI terminology for what I’m talking about). You can listen to your iPod while running, riding a bike, typing at the computer, etc., which isn’t possible with video.
- One potential for video is that you have a portable device that you can now share movies easily with other people. That large thump you just heard was the collective group of childless people just banging their heads against their keyboard realizing that, if digital cameras weren’t bad enough for creating endless photos and online albums of Junior, now their friends and family are going to always be cornering them with video clips of Junior crawling and throwing up. It remains to be seen how much this type of usage will catch on beyond people with newborns, but we were kind of skeptical.
- The best potential for a killer app is the video equivalent of podcasting. The idea being that someone could download an ESPN feed of sports highlights for the previous day or a CNN feed of the current news and then watch a 20 minute video on their commute to work on the subway, for example. Basically, something to take the place of reading the paper over your coffee break…instead, you can now get a video presentation to kill the time.
As a final note, I don’t see the whole selling music videos for $2 on iTunes being that popular. There’s hardly a video that would be worth that so that I could watch it repeatedly. But, maybe that’s just me.
Tags: apple, Business, ipod, Science and Technology
Your terminology is good enough for me. If you really wanted to talk about “attentional resources”, I’m sure you could – but who wants to do that?
Thanks, DC. You’re right in that I haven’t exactly noticed a groundswell of support for a discussion of attentional resources among blog readers.
Remember the MIT Geeks who were runnig around with a monitor mounted in an eyepiece and recording everything that was happening around them at the time? Eyeglass monitors would allow a person to jog, work, or whatever else while “viewing” the video event. However, I don’t suggest jogging along a public park where people have their dogs on a leash with this sort of contraption attached to one eye. One could easily trip over a leash due to attention deficit (right Leigh Ann?).
Just curious- why ipod instead of some of the other options available. And “Because I saw Leonardo DiCaprio wearing one” is not an acceptable answer.
Because George Bush wears one?
Really because everything I’ve heard indicates that they have a user interface which blows the competition away. And, I’ve already started going through iTunes adding cover art for all our MP3s.