Will Apple or Sony ever get portable video off the ground?
Steve Jobs said it, the low sales on the Sony PSP indicate it, and the failure of video 3G on mobile has proved it. Yes, who wants to watch Star Wars on a one and a half inch screen when you can watch it at home on a fifty-inch plasma with seven channel sound system?
Well not quite, unfortunately most of us can only aspire to the cinema experience sold to us in the dream gizmo gadget magazines. But, more of us have the near cinema experience in our homes than few years ago. On the content side, the latest cinema releases are following to DVD almost as soon as the movie has stopped showing at the major league multiplexes as movie marketing execs have realised that they can capitalize on the millions spent in advertising and make as much, if not more on sales of the DVD. So, if anything, the consumer experience is starting to match the multiplex experience – in some cases the experience exceeds the multiplex experience, hands up those who’ve parted with hard earned dollars only to by sent to Screen 37, you know the one with 20 seats tinnie sound and a six by four screen with ice cream spilt on it.
But what of the handheld video experience, well a few years after the release of the iPod, rumours of an impending video iPod hitting the press daily, Steve Jobs was forced to do something he hates doing, specifically he was forced to give reasons why Apple hadn’t entered the video market - he said: you can listen to Music in the background, while movies require that you actually watch them. You can’t watch a video and drive a car, he said: We’re focused on music. Specifically Jobs hit on the real issue; tiny video isn’t going to cut it for major length feature films. OK, so Apple now has a video iPod, but we’d be happy to bet that it’s still only used by a minority of people for video.
So where does that leave the market, well it’s still pretty much an open race at the moment. Primarily, because Hollywood is paranoid about loosing control of the distribution of the media. The money made by Hollywood over the last hundred or so years has been easy to channel, control and extract. Over this period the opportunity for producing cinema grade copies of any movie has been small because the investment costs of equipment to dupe and the chances of being caught were very high. But now things have changed, with HDTV on the market it could be argued that the home experience does, or soon will exceed the Cinema experience- and certainly, even kids now have access to copying through their PCs up in the bedroom.
So expect to see Hollywood deliberately use different channels to market and try to control and constrain each of these as much as possible. Certainly, don’t expect Apple or Sony to sign up any global and exclusive deals - unless Hollywood has lost it’s marbles. Clips, previews, short films - or course - after all its free advertising. No the only people getting rich in the current market are the media lawyers.
As for the handheld video experience, well we think it’s just a fad. Don’t believe us, then think of the Sinclair Microvision - what?– yes google it and wonder at what technology even Mom and Pop had access to in the sixties (see the picture).