| Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
14:34 - Video killed the audio star
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It turns out that the big news with iTunes 4.8 is that you can now add your QuickTime movie files to the Music Library and fill out info tags for them just like any song file; double-clicking on any video in the Library plays the video in the Album Art pane in the lower left (if it's open), or in a separate window or full-screen (as selected in the Advanced Preferences pane). There's a new "Full Screen" button along the bottom left for switching in and out of full-screen mode, which may placate those who (rightly) loathe the QuickTime Player's lack of a full-screen playback feature in the unregistered version.
People have been predicting a video-organizing iTunes for a long time now, and I've pooh-poohed the idea; I guess I may have to eat some crow, especially if (as it seems) the purpose is ultimately toward a video-playing color-screen iPod (Apple seems to be phasing out the "iPod photo" branding on the color-screen iPods, according to the "EncycliPodia" pamphlet available in Apple Stores that spends more time talking about "iPods with color displays" than "iPod photo" models). I haven't seen such a thing as comprising a sensible business model for Apple. Yet here we are.
It appears that the impetus for this change, though, is not feature films or news reports, as many imagined (and I continue to doubt), but music videos. It's all part of the iTunes Music Store's continuing expansion of the brand, which now includes all kinds of multimedia stuff that comes with many albums—"digital booklets" in PDF form, "box sets" of downloadable music, and now QuickTime videos that augment albums for a nominal extra fee (another 99 cents for a video—or free, with a paid album, like the four free videos with the Gorillaz single—not bad). The videos now get organized into your iTunes Music folder along with the music, and iTunes happily plays them right in-line with the songs they go with.
This seems to be sort of an afterthought, in any case—it doesn't look like the kind of thing Apple would have had planned all along. There's no DRM in these movie files, obviously. Presumably they don't care about file-swapping of videos, if only because there are so few of them compared to music files, and they serve primarily as marketing agents for the songs themselves (the audio quality is never as good, the file size is much bigger, and watching a video is an active thing that requires you to sit and look and pay attention, as opposed to the passivity of music that you can play while you read or drive or ski, all things that turn video-watching and -sharing into a much different dynamic).
I still have a hard time imagining people downloading entire Hollywood movies onto their iPods to watch on the little bitty screen, or even hooking them up to a TV to watch them there—I mean, come on: there are much better, cheaper, and more convenient ways to watch movies on your TV. But to show a friend the latest three-minute video from a favorite band... well, if it helps to grow the brand of the Music Store and the penetration of QuickTime, perhaps Apple determined that there was really no compelling reason not to.
UPDATE: And I suppose if the QuickTime videos Apple wants to send people are going to be encoded in H.264, then hey—let's do all we can to get it going. I was skeptical, but now I've seen Jeff Harrell's side-by-side Sorensen vs. H.264 comparison, and I gotta say I see the light. That's damn good. Seriously. Go see.
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Brian Tiemann
