the chutry experiment

Nice articles all around, although I do fins it fascinating that (in my observation) not one remark is made about the battery life of the iPod video. Technophiles always seem to treat battery life as some rapidly growing adolescent-- there might be a couple of years of problems but soon enough, things will sort themselves out quite nicely. This often isn't the case, however. Laptop batteries, for instance, have come a long way but still have an equally long way to go. Digital cameras might use 2GB memory sticks but without 4-5 extra sets of batteries, you'd never be able to fill it on one outing.

There's been significant progress, no doubt, on the home theater front. To think that we're only really 20 or so years from the beginning of the full-scale integration of the home video player is quite astounding. But think of the changes in that time. We've gone from stationary viewing to transportability in two decades. The trajectory of medial progression, though, is always beyond our capacity to power these media. So as long as we just "assume" that battery life will catch up, we should also at least conjecture that by the time it does, the technologies involved will also have changed, and the paradigm once again shifted.

Now, if we're talking about the emancipation of content as opposed to the emancipation of the viewer's location, that's a different story altogether, and one that deserves Manovich's claim that "Fall 2005 will be remembered as a milestone in the history of media".

Marc, that's a good point. I don't really use an iPod, so the battery issue is something I haven't experienced (otherwise I likely would have mentioned it because the lack of power would annoy me).

The emancipation of content seems like the more interesting point/possibility to me, too.

Yeah-- of course I forget to mention my main point-- you only get (at most) 2.5 hours of playback on the current gen of iPod videos. That's one film and done. I see this more as a nuisance than a revolution.

It's also 2 to 3 episodes of Lost (sans commercials, of course). Or a half dozen short films or videocasts....

If it's enough to get people through a boring DC commute on Metro, they're probably not going to complain.