iPod Video - not for a few years yet

This week's announcement of the iPod Photo surprised many people. If you're going to add a color screen to an iPod, why not make it capable of playing video as well? Wouldn't the next logical step be video, not photos?

Personally, while I question the utility of the iPod Photo for storing and displaying photos, it is an intermediate step that may prove to be necessary. The iPod was a revolutionary device in one respect only: instead of being like other MP3 players that used memory cards for storing music, the iPod used a small form factor hard disk to store music, enabling it to pretty much stomp on the competition in terms of music storage. Apple came late to the MP3 party, in the Fall of 2001, while the first MP3 player was released in January of 1998.

By the time the iPod came out, everyone knew what an MP3 was, and probably had quite a number of them on their hard drives or on CDs. We've reached the point now where digital cameras are ubiquitous in our society. It feels like everyone has one, if not more than one. People are no longer shocked or impressed when I whip out my digital camera, and I do not need to explain to them what it is. It's time for the iPod Photo to act as a portable phot album. Remember in 5th grade how people used to carry around wallet sized photos and show them off to their friends? Same thing, except geekier.

An iPod Video in my mind will only happen when the following conditions are met

• Apple has the ability to sell video
  
  For the iPod, Apple uses iTunes as it's storefront to sell music tracks. For the video iPod, a similar mechanism must exist (we'll call it iVideo Store), not just from a "we make 4 cents from everything sold", but when people buy gadgets that require media, they want a library of material to choose from. When people bought their first DVD players, the first thing they did was to purchase (or rent) DVDs.
  
• DRM exists for Digital Video
  
  Basically some form of copy digital protection must exist to protect the rights of the copyright holders of the works. Legal digital distribution through the internet won't really happen without it. The new format that Apple designs could also reduce the resolution of the movie, but that might make it look bad if it was played back on the TV.
  
• Network Bandwidth Pipes become larger
  
  One of the great things about music files, is that they aren't very big, and they transfer relatively quickly. The same can't be said about video. With the size of a DVD movie between 4 and 8 gigabytes of data, downloading a movie from the iVideo store would take about 2 to 4 hours on a 1.5 Mb DSL line.
  
• Wireless access is increased
  
  What would make this device killer is if it could stream content via WiFi (or whatever the next couple of iterations of WiFi is), that way you could stream the video straight to your device or have it stream unattended while you aren't using it. This would certainly help the long download times just a little bit.
  
• Small Form Factor Hard Drives with More Capacity become available
  
  This goes back to the size of a DVD movie. With each movie being 4 to 8 Gigs, a 60GB iPod then can only hold between 7 and 15 movies. Enough for a movie night or two, but not enough for carrying around your entire DVD collection. To get to that point where you can bring a variety of movies with you, I think we need to start looking at iPods that are in the 300+ GB range, which we clearly aren't there yet.
  

There are of course, other problems, like how unsatisfying it is to watch a movie on a tiny screen, or how competition from portable DVD players and laptops dilute this niche market. For instance, whenever I travel, I load 3 or 4 movies onto my Powerbook's Hard drive so that I can watch it at the airport, on the plane, in the hotel room, etc.