| Thursday, October 6, 2005 |
17:16 - Whither video?
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So what's coming on October 12?
Although pretty much everybody agrees that the announcement will somehow center on video, Think Secret insists that we won't be seeing a "video iPod". Yes, one is reportedly in development, but it's not coming next week.
Which I still think makes plenty of sense. Who really wants to watch movies on a two-inch screen? The only way a video iPod would make sense is for it to be a largish hand-held screen on the order of the PSP. And that means it would be competing with the PSP, and would probably cost more, and not play games. Doesn't sound like a winning proposition to me.
Unless, of course, Apple were to work out some method by which you could rip your DVD movies onto your hard drive in the same way you can do now with audio CDs, and then organize them in the long-fabled "video iTunes", and then transfer them to the video iPod via FireWire/USB2 to store on its internal 80GB drive. But that's also a long shot. DVDs are a lot more structurally chaotic than audio CDs, which are bound by a very restrictive standard: add DRM to an audio CD, and it's no longer an Audio CD™. DVDs are a wholly different animal, with myriad different ways to encode the content, trailers, alternate audio tracks, special features, and so on, to say nothing of the DRM flavor of the day. MacTheRipper (currently on the run from the authorities) has fairly good "main feature detection", so it's not impossible to do from a technical standpoint—but the big barrier, naturally, is the MPAA, which would never allow such a breach of their control. The big labels already regret not having more control over the format of a CD; they're not about to give up what hold they have on DVDs.
So that's not in the cards, I would think. Yet, and this is telling: http://www.apple.com/movies returns a 403 error, not a 404. That means something's there, and in internal dry-run testing with live URLs, and the webmaster is too lazy to have put up a custom 403 page that looks like a 404 page. (Thanks to Lileks for spotting this!)
Which means, to my eyes, an online, downloadable movie store. So you can get pay-for-download movies, perhaps in nice HD-quality H.264, to play on your computer.
Now, that sounds well and good, especially if it's cheap (like $10 a movie, with infinite playability, like with the iTMS). But even then I don't think I can see getting too excited over it... unless there were, say, an AirPort Express-like box with video capabilities, for sending the movie wirelessly to your TV rig.
Is that a viable business proposition for Apple? Is it something customers are ready for? It's certainly got the appropriate geekiness level—which is to say, no more tech-savvy required than using iTunes and AirPort Express. But what about the cost? The movie industry has been trying for years to figure out what the best and most profitable way of selling movies is: buy-once, own-forever DVDs? Rentals? Limited-play-count auto-degrading discs? Pay-for-play (e.g. DiVX)? Some of these schemes have failed abjectly, and others have achieved great popularity even though they aren't the most efficient use of viewers' money (think of any typical thousand-dollar DVD collection that the owner never takes down off its shelf). But that's really the studios' dream, right there: more money paid for stuff that doesn't necessarily cost the studio anything.
How would downloadable movies fit into this universe? Would the studios see it as a cash cow or a loss-leader? Would they be able to price it such that it makes them money and is at the same time attractive to buyers? How paranoid would they have to be about DRM, and what technology would they use?
I think they can swing it. At least, I'm going to assume they can, because that's where all the signs are pointing.
So that's where my money is. But I'm not the first to put it there; I'm in good company, it seems.
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Brian Tiemann
