realityBYTES - Ipods fail screen test: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/06/25 > realityBYTES - Ipods fail screen test

realityBYTES - Ipods fail screen test
Sunday, June 25, 2006 - By Adrian Weckler
The company that controls 75 per cent of the world’s digital music market is clearly showing signs of losing touch. Nobody wants to watch King Kong on an iPod Nano.

Two minute clips of Premiership goals? News headlines? A new music video? That’s different. But Lawrence of Arabia? This is why God gave us 32inch widescreen televisions.

Yet Apple is pushing on with its film download plan. It is in negotiations with US film studios on how much each film will cost iTunes users and what punters might do with it once they download it.

But if it continues, Apple will be the latest in a long line of firms that have tried and failed to carve out a market for movies on devices unsuited to it. It goes back to the mid-1980s, when Sinclair produced its failed portable black and white TV. Recently, Sony tried to convince women and non-gamers that its PSP device is also a fancy portable DVD player. But they’re not buying it.

It’s not so much the lack of movie choice or even the high cost of the specially created Universal Media Disc. You simply can’t appreciate Titanic on a four-inch screen. And that goes double for an iPod’s two or three inch screen. Perhaps, as rumours suggest, a larger iPod is on the way. But who wants a larger iPod?

Apple presumably knows this, which is why it invented iPod Nanos. But perhaps Apple is looking at the takeup of TV services on mobile phones, such as Vodafone’s recent collaboration with Sky. That service, which gives Vodafone’s Irish 3G users access to 23 TV stations, is useful.

But its purpose is to catch up with the day’s events, or take in a few minutes of music or sport. Vodafone’s statistics bear this out, with most of its viewers tuning in for less than 20 minutes per day. It is not to watch Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in between texting.

The bottom line? Films are made for 20 foot screens and 30-inch televisions. Our eyes know this. They will never settle for three inches.

Clarification: l a s t week’s column wrongly suggested that 70 per cent of Screenclick.com’s customers had not received their DVD by post. This was incorrect. The article mixed up figures relating to An Post’s delivery rates. We are happy to correct the record.

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