Archive for September, 2006
Apple video: it’s not about the iPod
As expected, Apple revamped the iPod range yesterday; however, the expected video iPod didn’t appear. Instead, Apple provided a sneak peek of a product due in early 2007 dubbed “iTV” - which, to me at least, is more important than a video iPod.
Portable music makes sense because it’s the soundtrack to whatever you’re doing, whether that’s jogging, sitting on a bus or mowing the lawn. Portable video, though, is a much trickier proposition. It needs your full attention or it’s pointless, and unless you’re doing serious travelling then there aren’t many times when you’ll sit and watch a film on a portable device. For most people, movies are things you watch from your sofa.
iTV (terrible name, which Jobs promises to change) is designed for sofa watching, and it acts as a bridge between iTunes and your TV. The idea makes sense to me - I’ve got a Mac Mini under the telly, which I use as a jukebox and a player for bittorrent videos of programmes I’ve forgotten to watch. But it makes sense for Apple’s movie ambitions too.
Video on iPods is a fairly minor business, but video on your TV is a much bigger opportunity. I suspect that’s why Apple announced the iTV early: the initial iTunes video line-up is Disney, Disney, Disney, and iPod-only video is a market the other film studios can afford to ignore. But if Apple can do serious business in living rooms then that changes the game considerably. If iTV is a success, it could enable Apple to pull off the iTunes trick a second time, with a video service so popular that the studios need to be part of it.
Will that happen? I’ve no idea. I’m not convinced by the pricing of Apple’s movie downloads and suspect the UK prices will be horrific, especially compared to the cost of a DVD in Tesco. Then again, I don’t buy music from iTunes because I don’t like the format, the price or the DRM, and that clearly makes me unusual among Mac owners. What I do know is that Apple’s taking a big gamble here, and it’s moves like this one that make it such an interesting company to watch.
As for the rest of the keynote: iTunes 7 is nifty, the incomprehensibly popular Shuffle is even smaller, the new Nanos are great and the combination of increased storage and reduced prices make the current iPods better value for money than ever.
Pop song correspondence
I’ve been meaning to link to McSweeney’s for a while, because its pop song correspondence section is full of gems like this letter to regional law enforcement agencies:
But that’s not what we’re up against. Bon Jovi is no regular cowboy. He rides a horse made of steel. A steel horse. I am not shitting you.
Elsewhere on the site, bedtime stories by Thom Yorke.
The ultimate blog post
This Wired column made me laugh with its suggestions for the ultimate posts for various well-known blogs:
Cute Overload: A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny.
Fleshbot: Same as Cute Overload, only with coeds.
Franz-tastic
I’ve written about supremely talented mashup merchant Thriftshop XL before, but I didn’t realise his stuff was on YouTube. This remix combines Franz Ferdinand, Run DMC and The Knack to superb effect.
[Via PopJustice]
24 inches of Mac
Apple’s quietly updated the iMac line, with a new - and absolutely massive - 24-inch widescreen model at £1,349 including VAT. Spec’s pretty decent: 2.16GHz core duo, 1GB RAM, 250GB hard disk and an 8x SuperDrive. Nice.
The case of the disappearing blog post
Weird… I responded to a TechCrunch UK post this morning which said:
BuySigns Signs On To The Web
Devon based, BuySigns has launched a new service enabling people to build their own house and office signs online. Although this service will not revolutionise the world or probably make BuySigns an acquisition target for Yahoo!, it is interesting to see how more and more niche high street services are now moving to the web.
I can’t remember the exact words, but I’d written something like this:
“Now moving to the Web”? These kinds of businesses have been online for years… signmakers, organic farmers, guitar shops… niche businesses were using the Web for years before the big brands.
I didn’t think I was being particularly opinionated, and didn’t mention that you’ve been able to buy signs from buysigns.co.uk for at least four years. But the post and my comment have disappeared.
Surely it’s bad blog etiquette to delete a post when someone’s commented on it? That’s what I thought, which is why so much of this blog has people pointing out that I’m an arse.
Microsoft does a happy dance
It’s hardly unexpected, but Sony’s finally admitted that the global launch of the PS3 isn’t going to happen. Instead, the US and Japan will get vastly reduced shipments in November and Europe won’t get any (officially, at least) until March. Which leaves Xmas wide open for the price-reduced Xbox 360 which, in the next few months, will get Gears of War, F.E.A.R, Just Cause and the latest editions of various sporting and racing titles. And then of course there’s Halo 3, which will no doubt appear just before the PS3 ships.
Useful tech advice
If you’ve got 20,000 emails in your various folders from 2005 and before, it might be a good idea to export them to an archive and delete the originals. No, really.
Let’s start a b(r)and
The relentless march of advertising into music isn’t exactly new (although it’s still annoying: witness the increasing use of video screens to blast adverts at rock gigs, something that was previously confined to pop gigs such as Girls Aloud) but this represents a new low: Honeyshot have been put together by Saatchi and Saatchi as a vehicle for brands. As Popjustice puts it:
In spite of parading a level of pop integrity that makes Steve Brookstein look like Stephen Malkmus, we thought this might have been quite interesting - after all, most of the people working in advertising have better and more exciting ideas than most of the people working in pop marketing.
We were wrong. The single, ‘Do It’, is alright and the girls themselves seem perfectly likeable - but the band is shit, their video is shit, their website is shit, their styling is shit. The whole thing is just a shower of shit.
Popjustice goes on to give the whole thing a well deserved kicking.
Barlow’s bang on
[photopress:oct06cover_1_225px.jpg,full,pp_image]
Jason Barlow, editor of Car magazine (one of my favourite magazines) nails the whole future-of-magazines thing in this month’s Editor’s Letter:
…in the process of migrating the elements which best suit the functionality of the Internet, we’ve decided to really concentrate on the things that only a magazine can deliver on. More than ever, Car is packed with long, beautifully written features, a news bulletin section that offers an insightful and analytical overview rather than just paying lip service to the month’s big issues, expertly crafted drive stories and definitive comparison tests, as well as provocative columns and heartfelt opinion. It also looks pretty good, and most of the photographs are in focus…
…in an era when everyone from Rupert Murdoch to my own mother is wondering if the magazine format might be on the way out, we’re saying no, it isn’t. Only people in crass Hollywood movies use laptops in bed, and most of us spend far too much time in front of PCs as it is.