Why i don’t believe in mobile video
When reading this article at ipodlounge i had the following realization: if you wanna see the future, look at the past. There’re already several precedents demonstrating that mobile video won’t fly.
Remember the old days when people didn’t use spinning magnetic platters for all their media storage? Those where the days of untivoed radio and tv broadcasts, magnetic tapes and optical storage discs. All these media’ve been used for distribution and consumption of both audio and video, all of them were vastely successful and resulted in tons of playback devices. Take portable cd players and portable dvd players as an example. The former cheap, successful, lots of people still using them, the latter expensive, cumbersome. I’ve never seen anybody using a portable dvd player in my life.
While portable music players are a cheap commodity with broad social acceptance, portable video players will get you as much acceptance as the word “geek” tattooed in bright red letters onto your forehead. With ipods sticking to what they’re really good at (playing music and looking cool) while becoming cheaper and cheaper, i don’t see a rosy future for personal video players. Just because something works in the living room doesn’t mean it’ll work on your daily commute or on your next shopping trip. All those people clamoring for mobile video apparently believe that video is just audio with moving pictures slapped on, that both work pretty much the same - just as people have their stereo next to their home cinema in the living room. Here’s a clue: it doesn’t work that way. As much as i believe that microsoft is onto something with their media center pcs i also believe they’re way off with personal media players as ipod killers.