December 31, 2005
iPods Whats in the Hype
Well I hope everyone had a good Christmas as we look forward to a new year. This christmas was good for me I had worked my rear off to ensure my wife and I would encure no debts this christmas season as we have a very large family and extended family the christmas season can be both exausting. So whats this have to do with iPods? Well this christmas I recieved one and after using it for a while all I can say is, "Wow!" My attitude towards the iPod has been one of disintrest to say the least. After all I have a nice vga enabled PDA with 512MB of SD storage that holds all my media rather nicely. I never saw for myself what the benifit to owning yet another media device was. That is until I got to playing around with some of the features of the iPod.
When I first opened up iTunes I expected it to be a cake walk to put some of my MP3 tunes on the iPod, it wasn’t. The interface is still rather clunky for everything but purchasing music. The multitude of settings for managing the music on the iPod is a bit of a drawback componded by the fact the drag and drop interface for managing music happens all within the itunes client. This means music you drag and drop into the iPod disk sits in the disk and is not accessable via the iPod itself. I wonder why more people don’t see the inherent drawback to this when they evangelize the iPod. In any case this particular drawback asside the overall experience with the device is absolute bliss.
The potentials of this device are amazing. I’ve already figured out how to get my video off my tivo and compressed into a format for the iPod. I’m working on a way to automate the process of creating an actual podcast I can subscribe to that will basically download all the programs I regularly record to the iPod. This gives you true tivo to go. Being able to catch up on the latest episode of my favorite shows is very promissing for me. In addition to being able to do this with my own digital content for my personal use there is a vast array of independant content available via podcasts that is sure to change the face of broadcasting.
IpTV is here with the iPod with iTunes rss xml http and a little bit of elmers podcasts with video content are now the infancy of IpTV. With the independant content out there you can now "subscribe" to a video stream that will download to your ipod when a new version is released so you can watch it when you want. I don’t know how or when this will effect large broadcast networks but with various shows already available for purchase on iTunes you cna only imagine where this could lead. It is more or less a level playing field for anyone who wants to get into broadcasting. With very little equipment and for less than 1000 you cna be your own independent content producer capable of distributing you own IpTV content to the iPod.
As time permits I will follow up with some howtos for creating digital content and maybe I will release some software to help people wanting to view tivo on their iPod.