David Pogue’s Circuits email this week details an interview with Steve Jobs: one of the topics discussed was video players, of some undetermined form . . . .
But Mr. Jobs outlined three reasons he doubted video players would ever approach the success of audio players — not even counting their high price ($700 and up) and the time-consuming difficulty of loading huge video files onto them. It was clear from his answers that Mr. Jobs has done quite a bit of thinking about the topic.
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 &emdash; you get a very close equivalent to the concert-hall experience.
But watching video on a tiny three-inch handheld 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.
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.
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 10 times in their lives, and therefore don’t buy nearly as many movies as they do songs or CD’s.
[ . . . ]
“Now, I’m not saying we’re not working on something like that,” Mr. Jobs added. “Who knows what we’ve got in our labs?”
Movies are an immersive experience: as noted above, you don’t watch a movie while you do homework or jog (at least not productively or safely). Unless some other kind of content in factored into this (something that isn’t affected by screen size like a movie would be and that doesn’t require a 90 minute investment), I’m not sure what’s a-brewing. A TiVo player you carry around, perhaps? Sync it up with your PVR and take your programming to go, along with your music . . . . .
There’s the obvious tease there, between what he says about their labs and the widely-discussed job posting for a video engineer with experience in consumer electronics . . . something’s up at Infinite Loop.
[Posted with ecto]
