A news article at the BBC web site (see the link below) chronicles the difficulties a number of tech companies have had in getting handheld televisions to succeed. During the early 1980s the British company Sinclair (perhaps most famous for producing some of the earliest budget-priced home computers) offered up a handheld television about the size of a paperback book and with a small built-in LCD screen. Two Japanese companies, Casio and Sony, released their own versions, but like Sinclair they found it difficult to find a market for their products.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4341280.stm
What’s strange about this is that watching television appears to be one of the most popular ways people have of spending (some would say wasting) their time. A recent survey in the UK found that the average Briton spends 18 hours a week watching television. People spend far more time watching television than listening to music, yet Walkmans, iPods, and other portable music devices have been popular with consumers for well over twenty years now. Why do we accept portable music so much more readily than portable video?
My take on this is that there is a fundamental difference between sound and video. Listening to music on your hi-fi at home is essentially the same experience as listening to music on an iPod. Sure, there are differences in depth and quality, but overall, we can appreciate the music in either case perfectly well. The fact that we’re likely to be travelling or working when listening to an iPod isn’t all that different to listening to music at home, where we might just as easily be reading a book, cooking, or performing household chores. Music is as much the background to what we are otherwise doing as it is the focus, hence the ease with which we connect particular songs with certain events. I’m sure you remember the music you played the first time you fell in love, but can you remember the TV shows at the time?
Video — television — is different. Most of us sink into TV and allow it to take over our experience. We only do the most passive things while sitting in front of the television, such as eating or snoozing. Television becomes the experience in a way that music doesn’t. If you need to work, or want to read a book, you can’t really do it while watching TV (a never-ending struggle between parents and their distracted children at homework time!).
Handheld video devices cannot work this way. You can’t walk down the street while watching TV any more than Gerald Ford can fart and chew gum at the same time. The video iPod can of course be used to watch video while you’re sitting on the bus or train, but that’s a fraction of the time it’ll be used as a traditional music player.
The one exception to the failure of small screen video devices is of course gaming. Handheld gaming machines, from the GameBoy onwards have been phenomenally successful, and it’s hard to imagine that Apple haven’t considered offering the iPod as a potential platform for video games. The scroll wheel and buttons could work nicely for this, and the screen is comparable to early versions of the GameBoy. Where games for traditional handheld devices are bought as cartridges, there’s no practical reason they couldn’t be downloaded in a pay as you go way like iTunes.
I don’t expect the video iPod to develop as a way of watching mainstream television programmes if history is anything to go by. The idea of people watching 30 or 60 minute programmes on a handheld device hasn’t worked before, and I’m not convinced we’re any more receptive to the idea now. But there’s no reason shorter, primarily special issue, art, or amateur videos couldn’t be produced. Expect to see an “export to iPod” option to iMovie in the near future, so people can create five-minute shorts they can send to friends and family.
But in the meantime, the video iPod remains, I think, a signal of intention more than the start of a whole new market in downloadable, portable, TV.
Neale Monks
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