At Netimperative: Apple’s plans for music videos
My latest column at Netimperative looks at Apple’s soft launch of music video sales through the iTunes Music Store.
Why didn’t Apple announce it? What are the plans? Speaking as someone who worked out today how to get the Queens of the Stone Age video to transfer and play on his new Sony Ericsson K700i* (on which more later), the answer to those questions is: “so it can make a bigger splash”; and “far-reaching”.
How about, for example, putting all of the music video catalogue online? Why not? Come on, for 99p people would surely download that Eric Prydz video. I can imagine a few of them would keep it on their phone for, uh, private moments…
Hmm, the nexus of music, video, porn and mobile phones. For some, it’s a sort of nirvana. No, not the group..
(* Sadly you have to buy Quicktime Pro, but only once. Then you can encode .mov to 3gp, which will play on SE mobiles, and is much smaller - as in, about 10 times smaller in file size, so the Bluetooth transfer takes two minutes rather than ten.)
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Doing the math on music videos: surprisingly cheap (17 February 2005; score: 124.92%)
- Apple's video iPod comes nearer... at least online (22 July 2005; score: 88.69%)
- Netimperative: what's wrong with government telling us about technology (12 February 2005; score: 60.13%)
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May 20th, 2005 at 10:01 am
Actually, it’s worth noting that making back a million dollars, 99p at a time, would require 549,451 downloads. Of course, I guess the record company doesn’t get the whole 99p, but then many music videos don’t cost a million dollars - particularly not stuff like Eric Prydz. So I can see the revenue potential.
I don’t think Apple would publicise the videos until they can be made portable, like the songs. I can see the benefits of phone integration (cos the kids will love it, and they’ve gotta be a big section of the market). Only trouble is, the phone networks are trying to get us to buy music videos from them, aren’t they? Hopefully, they’ll work that out.
A video iPod might work - if the fize sizes aren’t too much bigger than large MP3 files, it should make too much of a difference, should it? And I hear that, via H.264, you can get some pretty small video files.
May 20th, 2005 at 10:28 am
I might be linking two totally unrelated spheres here, but I wonder if the fact you can get an increasing range of media on to portable devices will acclelerate / impact the debate on the filesharing tax?
If the tax is designed to compensate “seepage” (which thankfully does not refer to anything invovled with the Prydz video…) then does it stand to reason that the increased number of industries involved - in this case the jump from music to movies / video - will start lobbying for the tax?
May 20th, 2005 at 11:03 am
Apple’s next push: Music Videos
Charles Arthur has written an interesting article about Apple’s soft launch of iTunes’ Music Video purchases. I suspect he’s right in that the reason Apple didn’t make more noise about it was down to the publicity going on with …
May 20th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
Paul, it doesn’t matter if the phone networks are trying to get us to buy videos over their network. If I can transfer the file to my mobile and play it, I will. And lots of kids will work out how to. OK, so it needs a paid encoder. Apple might find a revenue stream while making that encoding free. (That is, .mov -> .3gp. They could limit it just to that codec, perhaps.)