Portable Video Player Growing Pains
By Alexander Grundner |
February 14th, 2005 - Viewed
4,628 Times
Comments (0)
Om Malik of Business 2.0 posted an interesting piece on the state of portable video players entitled, “Video2Go, but Not Until 2006.” Om writes, “In recent days, I’ve polled executives at various companies that make these gadgets, and they say the whole video player industry is in a learning phase. James Barnard, who oversees Microsoft’s handheld video player business, points out that there needs to be a lot of compelling content before there’ll be demand, which is one reason the company is focusing so heavily on content. ‘Without content, this category cannot grow,’ says Jonathan Sasse, president of iRiver Americas, which makes one of the more elegant devices on the market. Sasse sees 2005 as a year of education, after which demand will start to percolate in 2006.”
While I agree that one of the key elements for portable video players to succeed is having compelling content available, I think the real hold up is form-factor. Who wants to carry around a brick (i.e. Creative’s Zen Portable Media Center) in their pocket? Om eludes to smaller iPod sized devices that offer color screens (some capable of playing video), but no one I know is interested in purchasing a video player to watch recorded TV shows on a 2-inch screen. Manufactures need to do more R&D to find the magic dimensions and weight consumers are looking for. We already have all the tools available to make the content available – DRM, transcoding and playback software – now we just need the ultimate device to play it on.