I’m sure Apple has spent gobs of money on market research and feel that there is a market for low res content at $1.99 a pop. They don’t spend the millions of dollars launching something like this without doing some homework.

Certainly mom and pop video blogs and other free type microcontent will benefit from this move just as podcasters have benefited from being added to iTunes.

Still though, despite my biases, I do believe that the actual product they are offering for sale is not compelling enough to appeal to anything but a limited audience of Apple fans based on this early initial hype. Time will tell of course and I’ll revisit this product in the future and measure it’s success.

The ultimate problem with this approach is the $1.99. $.99 was a valid price point for a legal song because some people felt that buying songs from iTunes was legal and “doing the right thing.” Still others were frightened over the fear of an RIAA lawsuit (as microscopic a potential this is statistically speaking) over to iTunes. Still others were fed up with the spyware and adware and bogus songs seeded on P2P. Hence iTunes became the defacto winner for a proportion (most music on iPods of course is not purchased from iTunes) of music.

iPod video is different. As “free” music is available to compete with iTunes still today just as Bittorrent is here to offer us “free” TV today, the difference is that there are a number of clean and legal other alternatives to getting TV off your, well TV. In addition to things like Orb and Slingbox you have TiVo and TiVoToGo. As you are well aware of course anyone can copy TV from their Media Center PC and put it on a portable device or a laptop (although I do anticipate this changing at least with some HDTV content with Vista, I hope you still allow non-HDTV programming to be copied).

My thoughts are with a lot of other free (well not really free but at no additional cost to people) avenues out there to get TV content, people will not choose to pay the $1.99.

Also when you buy a track from iTunes you can use it on any platform. You can put it on your iPod, you can listen to it on your PC at home, you can stream it to your living room, you can play it in your car with some cheap devices, etc. And although the format is not exactly WAV, the differential in quality is small.

With TV on the other hand, this is primarily a visual medium. While the poor low res quality won’t matter on a portable, it very much will matter on a PC screen and it will most definitely matter on a large screen TV. Thus this content will have a much narrower band of use than the music sold from iTunes.

Certainly I have not done the market research that Apple has, but I suspect you see them change course over the next year and I suspect that beyond this early 3 million pop you do not see the type of growth that they experienced with iTunes.

Time will tell of course.

Of course in all of this the profit to Apple comes from selling Video iPods and to a lesser degree the new iMac more than the TV itself (which I would suspect they make nothing on). The problem here will be that the demand for small screen portable TV will be small and the iMac is a horriblle expensive product with a built in screen that is only optimal for watching television for college kids in dorms. Opening up Front Row to the Mac Mini would help (and they will of course do this shortly), but I suspect that hardware sales of Video iPods and iMacs will pale in comparison to sales of iPods.

It’s also a long (and I do mean loonnnggg) term bet. But not without short term gains. I imagine the mom-n-pop video blogs available from iTunes are getting a boost in viewers from the fact Apple has marquee content drawing folks in.

Or maybe it’s time to do some Flickring instead.
You’re right, we’re both diehard Flickrheaded individuals. That’s why it surprises me to hear that you have so much time to watch TV, but given that I don’t, it probably explains why I must defend Apple’s honor when I can.

I would not swap my Media Center PC for an Apple PC because my Media Center PC can record TV and and iMac can not. Further, I prefer to consume my digital media on my 43″ plasma and not have a seperate unnecessary 20inch monitor built into the PC that I use to consume it. In order to best run this superior Media Center PC it is better to have other PC’s connected to it than Macs. I also use PCs at work thus the learning curve is easier when I use them at home.

I’m not saying there is not a place in the world for Macs — there is. There are those of course that blindly buy whatever Apple sells.

Am I a “mainstream diehard pcheaded dude?” Yep, pretty much. I’d also categorize me as a diehard HDTVheaded individual and even more than both of the both a diehard Flickrheaded individual as well. In fact, I’d also have to call you a little flickrheaded yourself.

Mr. Hawk. Would you swop your pc for an apple? No? Does that make you a mainstream diehard pcheaded dude?

Hrmf.

Must be nice to be able to buy a $300 video iPod and pay $2 for a poor quality video.

What people don’t know is that there are cheaper and just-as-efficient ways to get content on your portable device.

Here’s my forecast on FrontRow:
Apples’ gonna market the hell out of it and people are gonna buy because it’s freakin’ Apple. They’ve never heard of Media Center. They’ve never heard of portable media center’s. They’ve never heard of extenders. Microsoft better step up to the plate.

I took a look at *Dragnet* this morning. Apple’s price for all 17 episodes is $27.99.

Per DVDPriceSearch.com, I can get the DVD set of the same episodes for $29.95 (including shipping), which includes a bonus CD as well as actual physical media.

I want to like what Apple’s doing, but I know which choice makes more sense to me.