Interesting article in David Pogue’s column at the time. He discusses a meeting with Steve Jobs, where Steve argues against the needs for a video iPod for three reasons. I agree that the market for video players at this moment is poor but Steve’s reasons are not correct. Let’s take a look.

“First, he said, on a video player, "there’s just no equivalent of headphones." That is, when you put on headphones and press Play on a music player, the results are spectacular-you get a very close equivalent to the concert-hall experience. But watching video on a tiny three-inch hand-held screen is almost nothing like the experience of watching a movie in a theater or even on TV. It can’t approach the same realism or emotional impact.”

An interesting point. But Steve misses an experiential point. When I hold a small screen two feet from my face my eye perceives the experience to be the same as larger screen viewed from across the room. It’s basic principle explored in industrial psychology, but trust me, it’s true. Add in a good set of headphones and you have a very compelling experience (especially at 30,000 feet compared to craning your neck and watching the same move six times in a month on a dinky LCD screen)

Second, he pointed out that Hollywood has been a much better job of providing outlets for its wares than the recording industry. If you want to see a movie, you can see it in the theater, on DVD, on pay-per-view, on HBO, in flight, and so on. On the other hand, Mr. Jobs pointed out that until recently, there was pretty much only one legal way to buy music: go to a store and bring home a CD or tape. The debut of legitimate download services like Apple’s iTunes store was a huge factor in the popularity of portable music players-but there just isn’t the same kind of pent-up demand for new movie-buying channels.

This is fundamentally correct and yet still wrong. Music players sold quite well before there were online music stores. Granted it’s harder to get legal content to transfer. DVD decryption, unlike MP3 ripping is still not legal. But this overlooks an important venue for content, namely TV. There’s a lot of value in the ability to record my TV shows and then take that content with me. It’s not about purchasing new content per se. Of course, you need a way to get recorded TV on to your computer and this is an area where Apple is lacking at the moment.

Finally, Mr. Jobs noted, people just don’t consume music and movies the same way. You might listen to a certain song dozens or hundreds of times in your lifetime. But how many times in your life do you watch a movie? Most people probably wouldn’t watch even their favorite movies ten times in their lives, and therefore are don’t buy nearly as many movies as they do songs or CD’s. 

Again, a valid point but there are exceptions. Steve, you have kids. How many times have they watched Finding Nemo  or my favorite Monsters Inc? (You put that thing back where it came from or so help me, so help me, sp help me and CUT). We often travel with a Media Center PC that has recorded many hours of Arthur, Dragontails and Rugrats. There is a whole class of video content that gets watched over and over. For the rest, there are rental models. I don’t buy nearly as many movies as I rent and the ability to “rent” content for portable play is very appealing.

The hurdles to video today are the lack of content available for most computers, the difficulty of transcoding and getting that content onto other devices and things like short battery life. It looks like Portable Media Center will have the ability to counter many of these issues and end up being the exception that proves the general rule. (I say this in terms of vision and execution, these things could also be clunky, overpriced, with poor battery life and other issues. It would not be the first time that a solid vision by Microsoft was poorly executed by OEM partner.) We are working on a full report that will be released on Feb 2^nd covering the issue of portable media players how and when they might go beyond Music and adopt other functionality.