the chutry experiment

Chuck, it's interesting to me that you ask if anyone's actually watched anything on a video iPod. Myself, I'd like a video iPod, sure, but not for the purposes of watching anything on it. Instead, I'm excited by the prospect of sheer portability. It's one step - a vital one! - away from having to deal with hard copies of movies. That's where we're heading, and suddenly, we're heading there very fast. Two more news items, just today:

1. A prediction, re: the Xbox 360.

2. A possible deal between BitTorrent and the MPAA.

Same goes with the plain vanilla iPod. I've actually got one of those, and yes, I plug in the headphones and listen to music or podcasts, but I also use it to get a song from my computer to the family or a friend's stereo.

This will go double for video, I think, because watching video on the tiny screen will be not even half as pleasurable, but getting movies to the screens you want to watch them on will be several times easier than it is now.

David, the point about portability is an important one. I'd imagine that watching a film on an iPod would be relatively unsatisfying. Beyond the screen size, I'm guessing that there are limitations on what one can watch on that hypothetical bus or subway ride to work, both in terms of content and time constraints....

What sounds cool about such a thing is that I could use it for class. We've got TiVo, and this semester in my classes we've discussed environmental issues and the representation of the environment. I've recorded a couple of things that I'd've liked to bring into class, including the most recent Duracell battery ad where a group of "natives" use Duracell batteries in their GPS devices to save the rainforest. But I had no way to bring the ad to class since we don't have a VCR or a DVD burner.

OTOH, I think I've already complained in the past in your comment boxes about the spread of televisions into all kinds of public venues, and if lots of people start carrying around little iPod televisions with them everywhere, the situation will further deteriorate. I guess I'm a curmudgeon on this issue, but I wish people would acually, you know, talk to each other, instead of connecting only to little portable electronic devices.

Scrivener, I actually agree with you to a great extent about the ubiquity of TVs in public places. For some reason, I was being somewhat contrarian (and maybe a little self-critical) that week.

But your Duracel example is one very pragmatic version of how iPod video could be used (and of course an ad could be downloaded very quickly). In fact, this could be a way to make it easier to show short clips of films in class, which is fairly clunky on DVD in my experience.

BTW, I haven't seen it, but the Duracel spot you mention sounds really, um, weird....

Oh, I pretty much understood that you and I weren't really in disagreement on the basics. I do feel a little conflicted when I complain about that stuff--not so much about whether I'm right about the TVs being negative, but about taking that position of tsk-ing my finger at the mainstream culture in that way jsut seems pointless.

The Duracell ad is really weird. We had just read an essay on "saving the rainforest" and the way the rainforest and native peoples are portrayed in the media, and then read an essay analyzing ads for Sea World when I saw the ad. I've only seen it once all the way through, actually. But the gist of things is that Duracell can be trusted to power the GPS devices that scientists rely on to study and protect the rainforest. But the visual of the ad is of very native-lloking people (painted faces, no shirts, etc.) holding the devices and walking around in some jungle.

Okay, I've seen other commercials in that series, if not that particular one. Good to know that the kind folks at Duracell are out there saving the rain forest....