i feel obligated to comment on the latest news from apple concerning video in iTunes, cuz it seems like a pretty big deal.

steve jobs has long said that he didn't really believe in the concept of a video-playing iPod. i don't think this is a case of selling out, moreso being a bit pressured by the swiftly moving tech market. personally, i just don't see it really catching on well. forget whatever content is available for download, it's kind of irrelevant. just the nature of what an iPod is useful for, doesn't really involve holding it steady and watching a video on it. sure, an occasional cross-country traveler or daily train commuters may be able to take advantage, but i have difficulty believing that's a large portion of the iPod userbase. people may love the iPod's interface, but they sure as hell don't gawk at it the whole time they're listening to music.

apple's serving 320x240 resolution video for $1.99, which includes music videos and hour long tv shows. i'm trying to look at that price and resolution and really spin it in a positive light, but it's tough. i know this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg in this whole apple video scheme, but that resolution for that price is frankly quite poor. plus it's 4:3, not even widescreen. the $1.99 makes sense compared to $.99 for music, but i've never really agreed with their music prices either.

i think on the surface, $1.99 per TV episode (decidedly much worse for a music video) isn't too bad for people now and then catching up on missed episodes. but as far as bang-for-your-buck, it's a relatively awful price point. at least with music, you can justify that you plan to keep the music as long as you have the ability to hear, with TV eps... not all that many shows have a lot of repeat watchability, particularly dramas. so now it's $2 just to watch something once and then not really care about owning it? i saw that the first seasons of lost and desperate housewives were about $35 each, compare that with roughly $39 per season from amazon for the respective DVDs. when you look at it that way, iTunes videos are terrible ideas.

going even further, the aforementioned DVDs have a resolution of 720x480 and multi-channel audio. the iTunes video will look terrible if you scale it to 2-3 times its size to fill a computer screen. it's just simply a no brainer that buying the DVD is much more economically sound.

don't get me wrong, apple is sort of opening the door to a terrific idea. i've relied on newsgroup/bittorrent sources for archiving and catching up on episodes for the past year. at this point i even avoid tivo'ing certain shows because i can get them in better quality online, commercial-free. so to people like me, what apple's doing doesn't really mean quite as much. but i guess to all those people who request VHS taped shows on TV forums, they'd be interested in paying $2 to avoid missing a favorite show.

apple's always been against offering a subscription renting-your-music plan for iTunes music, which i think is wise. but for video, i think a subscription service actually makes more sense, given that 95% of the content out there most people are satisfied with watching once. currently we follow like roughly a dozen shows, it's just a terrible deal if you have to pay per episode to catch up on those. seems like it makes more sense to pay $10/mo or something to always have access to episodes.

all in all, i see the good in what they're doing, just that the resolution and cost seem relatively terrible to me. but who knows, i say the same thing about podcasting and that's still a bit of a buzzword lately. it'll be interesting to see the success or failure of iTunes video in the next six months.

--j