"Selling 1 million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests there is a market for legal video downloads," Steve Jobs, chief executive officer, said in a statement. "Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings, so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods."
So, I'm seriously thinking I need a video iPod. I know, that's the most pathetic thing you've ever heard, but hear me out. I download all of the shows I watch. That's about a total of ... I don't know at least a dozen shows a week. At the moment, the method I use to get these shows is considered illegal (because the commercials have been edited out), so, to counteract that, I'd be willing to pay iTunes money every month to be able to download these shows. I like that I get to watch programs how I want, when I want. I can put them on my XBOX and watch them in my bedroom, or I can burn them all to DVD and watch them on my TV in the living room.
So the problem with the shows is the commercials. For every 30 minutes of programming there is 8 minutes of commercials. Why not, for 8 minutes, intermittently stick commercials on 1/4 of the screen, or 1/2, or whatever. I'd be willing to watch the commercials during the show, although it would be distracting, it would be better than being considered a theif, just because I like On-Demand TV. I can't really think of any other way to forcibly keep commercials in the shows. If they are just there, every 10 minutes or so, it's just too easy to fast-forward through them, which means the TV networks would never agree.
Another problem with iTunes offering shows through their site is the resolution. If I own an iPod, it's great that I can watch these shows on it, but with such a low resolution (I think it's something like 320 x 240) there's no way you can watch it on a TV without it looking like complete shit. It may look okay on the 20" TV in the kid's room, but on the 27" in our room it'd look really bad; you can totally forget about the 51" in the living room. Also, I think the M4V (MPEG 4) files it uses are not compatible with any of the XviD players that I use. So does that mean that you can hook up an output to your TV through the iPod? I don't know, but I'd guess that it'd be a fairly expensive cable. I know enough about video compression and conversion to convert the files to something useful like VCD or SVCD or XviD or even DVD, but like I said, the picture would look like crap.
IPTV, I think, will solve all of these problems even though it's a ways away yet. NBC, CBC, CBS, etc, need to realize that their method of delivery, founded early in the last century, just isn't good enough for the new millenium. It would be nice to get rid of Shaw altogether as their content and costs are absurd, but that's another rant for another day.
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