on 8 February 2004So Steve Jobs has no plans to make a video iPod. At least, that’s what he told the New York Times, and anyone who knows Steve knows the very fact he addressed the subject at all means he has absolutely no intention of launching anything – otherwise he would have stuck both fingers in his ears, shouted ‘La la la can’t hear you’, and sicced his lawyers on every Apple-watching website, just in case.
I can’t say I blame him for ruling out an iVod or viPod or whatever the thing would be called. You can get a portable DVD player in Dixons for under 200 quid – there can’t be much profit in that. Build it around a hard disk instead of a DVD drive and what would you have? A more expensive gizmo that was harder to get movies into. And in what format would you store them to get a reasonable number on board? ‘Take your entire music collection wherever you go’ somehow has a better ring than ‘See all the movies you’d get on one plane, on a smaller screen’.
The trouble with digital video has always been the same: it’s just too big. One of the main reasons for the brisk demise of the CD-ROM market in 1996 was that the most cost-effective form of motion graphics to put on CD-ROMs was video footage, but the quality that could be stored on a 600MB disc and played back by a first-generation PowerPC or Pentium processor was abysmal.
It’s tempting to think the problem has long since been solved, just as every couple of months a reader is tempted to write to the MacUser letters page wondering how Macs can possibly need any more processing power when software already does everything as quickly as you could ever need. This reader clearly doesn’t run anything except TextEdit, and whoever thinks digital video is a done deal doesn’t subscribe to digital cable TV.
How do marketing people still get away with using ‘digital’ as a synonym for ‘higher-quality’? They should be forced to watch Law & Order on the Hallmark Channel via Telewest. At the beginning of each scene there’s a simple fade-in. Thanks to the high-quality magic of digital TV, it now resembles a squadron of robot fireflies shitting barbecued chunks of the next scene across the screen. Every time things get a bit dingy, you’re plunged into the same MPEG artefact hell. Scary movies are rendered more scary by movements caught in the corner of your eye that turn out to be stray luminance blocks. If MP3 sounded as bad as this looks, it would never have caught on.
At present, the nearest thing to a video iTunes is pay per view on digital cable. Whereas iTunes offers over 500,000 tracks, representing about 30,000 hours of content, Telewest has a couple of dozen films at any one time – about 50 hours. You pay £3.50 per movie, which sounds better than 99¢ per song, if you ignore the fact that you’re already paying a £20-plus monthly subscription. But you can only watch it once, and you can’t even pause the bloody thing. No wonder they’ve recently changed the name of the service from ‘TV on demand’ to ‘Pay per view’. Presumably ‘Small selection of craply encoded second-rank multiplex fodder that you can pay twice to see when we tell you’ wouldn’t fit on the remote.
Oh, and if anyone knows what happens in the second half of The Life of David Gale, please could they email in, because on my TV it consisted of an endless freeze-frame of Kate Winslet making a wry face. On the form of other Kate Winslet movies, this may have been correct, but I just wanted to check I’d got my £3.50’s worth.
Like in 1996, of course, we needn’t worry, because something better is coming. And that thing is… er… oh. Is it HDTV? A better picture, with more resolution, meaning you need a new telly, and the digital cable people have to pull even more bandwidth out of their hats. That’ll be the answer, then. If anyone can agree on the format.
In short, digital video today is a hopeless mess, and somebody needs to sort it out. Unfortunately, that would take a company that owns cutting-edge encoding and broadcast technologies, operates internationally, has experience of partnering with media owners yet is not tied to any one TV network or service, and has a couple of billion dollars in the bank to play with.
Um, Steve…
Update (May 2009): With hindsight, the author would like to apologise if this column in any way encouraged the development of AppleTV. On the plus side, Telewest (now Virgin Media) offers 500 films these days rather than 50, but they still go pixel-crazy if too much happens at once.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper 