Flash, Video, and Beyond: Future of MP3 and iPod - Portable Personal Media: The Return of the Hard Drive
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Portable Personal Media: The Return of the Hard Drive
After Apple released the Nano, many people interested in the personal electronics industry eagerly suggested that hard drive players were on the way out, and would soon become completely obsolete, or at the very least, significantly less popular then they were two years ago. However, within a month of releasing a player based around small form factor with less capacity, Apple again changed the rules of media players. This took the form of the iPod Video, Apple’s newly released portable personal media player that can play significantly more media types then just music.
The impetus to develop a video player can be seen in the behavior of most people using mp3 players today. As mentioned earlier, most people who use hard drive players currently don’t use even a majority of the storage capacity available on the player. This is probably due to the fact that users were unwilling to take the time to sift through all their music files to choose the ones he or she wanted to put on his or her player. Maybe not everyone even has 40 GB of songs. For whatever reason, people found it unimportant to actually use the full capacity of an iPod or mp3 player. This behavior begs the question, “What type of media files could be distributed to take advantage of the unused value that exists in hard drive media players?” The answer to this question, according the Apple, is simple: video.
What Apple has done in this new iPod is find a way to take advantage of the extra storage space available in an iPod without actually making the barrier to putting the media on the player any higher. With just straight mp3 players, it could easily become a chore to move music onto them simply because of the great volume of music they could store. The new iPod Video circumvents this problem due to the nature of video files. Video files are much larger then audio files, and thus fewer of them take up more space, making the task of moving them back and forth less of a chore. Also, by allowing many different types of media (audio, video, pictures, etc.) it is more likely that people will move pieces of each of their different collections of media to the player.
This new iPod is marketed on the premise of providing the user with a single, central device on which to play most forms of media currently available and demanded by the general public. In addition to playing music files, it allows the download and playback of video footage from iTunes, moving a user’s personal video media to the player, and finally storing and viewing pictures stored on the player. Adding these features required moving the player away from the flash media coming in to vogue in the mp3 player arena and moving back to a hard drive based player. Since video files require so much more space than just music files, it is clearly necessary to move back to the larger maximum storage capacity afforded by hard drives over flash media.
Integrating the new iPod Video with iTunes was another simple way to immediately stimulate demand. Rather than waiting for other vendors to create an infrastructure for disturbing downloadable digital media, Apple simply leveraged its current infrastructure to provide the service in conjunction with its new player.
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