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20051013 Thursday October 13, 2005

How the New iPod will lead to their self-extinction (eventually!)

From a techie's vantage point, the "new" iPod is a pretty simple hack; just add a video codec to the software mix on the device. 'Course it's essential that the display is good enough, that there is sufficient processing oomph to get decent frame rate, and that the batteries can handle the constant display activity. Storage wasn't ever the issue. Just some software.

[Aside: I was one of the co-founders of PictureTel, where I designed the signal processing hardware architecture. We ended up doing a completely custom bit-sliced designed, and ganged seven large-pizza-box-sized boards to build a complete codec. The whole thing was the size of mini-refrigerator. Twenty years later, it's now "just some software" on a consumer device...]

Lots of folks are going to wag about (lack of) content, screen size, etc. No doubt, all important to making this more than a hack and a real market success.

But I'm going to assume that it will be. What are the consequences? One of them will be the reinforcement on a proprietary distribution network and rights management system. That's a whole other topic. See what Jonathan says about why we have created the Open Media Commons.

Another will be around broadband demand. And that leads to a very interesting longer term question about the best way to connect displays to the Internet. The line of reasoning starts with a simple observation that network bandwidth the (machine synchronizing with) iPod will have a first-order effect on usability. The first-order analysis is pretty simple. The H.264 video codec is running at 750Kbps, plus another 128Kbps of AAC audio. Call it a megabit per second. This is a somewhat low bit rate video-quality-wise (3 or 4Mbps is a better number to keep in your head for DVD-level quality). The saving grace is the relatively small-sized screen (just about CIF).

So, if you have what we call today "broadband" (1.5 to 4 Mbps), then you can do the math. You might get 2x or 3x faster than real time for your download. Meaning, you'll wait 20 minutes to download an hour of video. Kinda best case, actually.

Your experience would be a whole lot better if you had, say, a 25Mbps or 100Mbps network connection. In that case it's just a minute or two for the download. There are many cable and wireline (and fixed wireless) operators who are aiming for this level of residential bandwidth. The build-out is a bit of a leap of faith. Who will possibly need all of that bandwidth? Without a lot of imagination the business case has it filled up with broadcast video content combined with network video-on-demand.

But, you wanna refresh your shiny New iPod with fresh content? Now that will suck down a lot of bandwidth. Let me emphasize "refresh". I, for one, can listen to a piece of music many many times. But with the exception of a few films (say, Dr. Strangelove or the Blues Brothers) once is enough.

Perhaps offline video play is the killer app for online bandwidth?

Perhaps. Though let's think it through some more. The whole reason to store content on a portable player is because of the lumpiness of bandwidth: both it's pervasiveness and it's service level. You want to carry it with you because you want to listen to (or watch) content in places where you don't have good enough networking to playout directly online. But, if you did, I'd claim that the interest in explicitly managing your device, or even taking it around with you --- fashion statement aside --- will go down significantly.

Why? Lots and lots of reasons that I won't belabor here because it gets to be a surprisingly emotional issue. I'll deflect a bit and speculate that for every person who wants to "own" their content and carry it around with them (in the form of personal player or personal computer), there is someone like me who wants a to get access to my stuff no matter where I am or whatever device I pickup or use. That's ownership, too, just more abstract. Call it my Personal Network. I, for one, don't want the bother of syncing stuff or worrying about them getting lost, etc.

An even bigger reason is that pervasive networking gets you access to entire connected world, especially interactive and participative content. The truly interesting stuff will be the result of new realtime communities that emerge and the fusion of services that intermediate them.

I'll bet that we will look back of this era of quasi-networking and wince, "How did we ever live that way?" And the idea of wanting to carry all of your content with you will seem both old-fashioned and rather ridiculous.

Here's my prediction: a successful portable video player (perhaps the iPod is it) will be THE big driver for significant increases in bandwidth and connectivity. Those increases, over time, will ultimately undermine the utility of "carry your stuff with you" personal devices and lead to the next era of real-time connected personal network.

( Oct 13 2005, 11:50:38 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [42]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/Gregp/entry/how_the_new_ipod_will
Comments:

I think you might be onto something here - as long as the problem of a sensible bandwidth, sensibly priced mobile solution is also solved. As an example I've stayed in 2 hotels recently. The first, in Paris, charged 200 euros a night, they provided a network connection in the room for which they wanted to charge something ridiculous like 1 euro a minute. It would have been cheaper to go to an internet cafe, where they are having to buy and support the computing hardware instead of just providing a network connection. The second hotel, in North Wales, cost £50 for two nights for two of us. It had free wireless access to broadband. Obviously I'd like to see more of the latter.

Posted by Phillip Fayers on October 13, 2005 at 03:19 PM PDT #

Hmm, let me see. iPod => ubiquitous broadband => reduced need to carry contents => demise of iPod How about? iPod nano at terabyte (or whatever size enought for lifetime storage), refresh only incrementally at StarBucks for free (government provided universal broadband, but not storage), pluggable into dataless terminal.

Posted by Sin-Yaw Wang on October 13, 2005 at 05:08 PM PDT #

Greg, No Security + Limited Speed + Frequency Clash + Proprietary software + Environment = Serious issues with Wireless deployment!

Posted by William R. Walling on October 14, 2005 at 08:25 AM PDT #

An interesting argument, I buy into the premise , and being a subscriber to the rhapsody service I have experienced the pleasure of being able to bring my music collection with me without having devote storage space to it ( if we step aside from the fact that th small all purpose device hasn't been created yet). However I have recently experienced frustrations with this system. As new artists develop new material the availability changes -- as they flex their licensing muscles for a time -- this leads to a certain fluctuation in "my" music collection where content I had access to before has suddenly vanished. This behaviour is very similiar to disney's jealous guarding of their content catalog. Rights owners are obviously going to want to extract whatever reward they can from their content, and it is unsurprising that they do. The flucations I experience in "my" collection brings on a desire for ownership -- to store, and harbour my content -- to pay one price and say thats it, its mine now! after all isn't ownership encouraged ? people are encouraged to buy homes / cars / TV's etc... So while I actually do utilize subscription services like rhapsody and HBO on demand. There are definite non technical kinks in the system that still need to be worked out before my desire for ownership of some content can be completely extinguished.

Posted by Ezra Simeloff on October 14, 2005 at 11:05 PM PDT #

Greg,

That your prediction about increased bandwidth leading to the demise of needing to carry around lots of data will be true in the long-term, I have no doubt. But the problem is that it's not clear that providers are actually building the right kind of networks to enable this in the medium term. So, how long is all this going to take? Ten years? Twenty?

The problem isn't the speed of the connection they're aiming to provide (I'm sure 50Mbps will be the norm in a few years), it's the total amount of bandwidth on shared pipes that's the issue (contention). Today, if even a low single digit percentage of users on consumer broadband make much use P2P and/or usenet binary newgroups, the pipes become saturated. And, because consumer broadband is economical only because of contention, this isn't going to change anytime soon. The days of 15TB monthly download allowances are a way off yet, so I think we'll be caching data locally for a long time to come.

Posted by Simon Brocklehurst on October 15, 2005 at 09:57 AM PDT #

You are 100% correct. I thought that the annoucement that you could purchase TV shows and other video content was bigger news than the annoucement of the video iPod itself. No longer will you have to progam your Tivo to grab the program during broadcast. For a small fee you can obtain the content at your own time and convience and it is commercial free! I agree that instead of carrying around your content with you, that you will want to store in on a server on the net where it can be accessed from anywhere. However when content becomes ubiquitus there is no longer even the desire to own it. For example, it is so easy for me to obtain DVDs from Netflix. I rarely have the urge to purchase a DVDs anymore. Access to libraries of content will save on storage space and ease the burden on consumers who will no longer have to manage the library. The future is really simple: consumers want what they want (content), when they want it (at thier convience), in the form that they want it in (easy to use format). Whoever does the best job at meeting this need wins. Consumers may trade some of one for more of the other. For example they may put up with a little DRM, for an easy to use large library of content, but they will migrate to a new company if it offers the same library with less restrictive DRM, etc.

Posted by Chris Nystrom on October 22, 2005 at 09:46 PM PDT #

[Trackback] Read what Greg has to say about New Ipod here

Posted by Famous bloggers on October 24, 2005 at 02:48 AM PDT #

You are absolutely right about broadband access speed being key factor determining userbility of iPod/iTune. I heard Ed Whitacke (spell?) of SBC making noise about charging the Yahoo Google or Apples out there for using their broadband access. If this is true, it will be really bad for the Internet and innovation. The root problem is that Internet de-coupled service from acess. In the old circuit switch world, services (eg telephony) were bundled with access. Without service revenue (taken away by Vonage and Skype), network operators won't be able to get return on the capital invested in broadband access. So who would spend the money to bring real super broadband to users, which is needed for iPod video-type applications, knowing that the benfits are going to Apple and Google, not the broadband operator. So my opinion is that the government should be the one spending money to bring broadband to every citizen, just as the highways are built by government. This may sound like too much socialism. The the fact of matter is that some other countries are doing that. The US is really falling behind in broadband penetration.

Posted by Paul Li on November 02, 2005 at 05:38 PM PST #

I agree we're still living in the wrong mindset, i.e. portable data! But think beyond and the amount of bandwidth needed once the data required to support holographic displays is needed dwarfs even these numbers. I predict in 20 years or less, the end of videographic display as we know and we wil all just project holographically instead! Take your seat around the arena and choose your vantage point. Come on let's talk about the future if we're going to talk at all. The iPod is already dated but I gotta love the touch wheel, which is beautiful ivention.

Posted by What About Holographic TV on November 06, 2005 at 08:35 PM PST #

Greg, I agree with you and many others that bandwidth/speed will be key factor (along with a LOT of battery power) in portability players. But, there is one other key factor. Money. As in... who gets it. Everyone is going to want a slice of that pie, and consumers are the people that are going to pay it. You'll find that licensing will quickly become a major sticking point, as that's how the flow of money will have to be controlled. Without encryption or other copy protection schemes that aren't easily broken by fifteen year olds, there will quickly develop an "underground" for digital copying and transfer of video, music, etc. Which means artists, directors, producers, distributors, agents, and, most importantly, CEOs... well... they get no kickback or profit. If there is no profit, then there is no incentive to make the technology feasible and commercially available. Once the copy protection scheme is created and made such that it can't be broken... then you'll have the opposite effect... CEOs will quickly see the ability to have huge $$$$$ dancing in their minds... and the ability to have "anywhere, anytime, anything" content will end up much like MP3 (legally, anyways) content is managed now... you can use it on one device and transfer it from one device to another... but you don't own it and it will most likely have a "timeout", "max-at-a-time" or other limit placed on it. Much like you can only check out three or so movies from NetFlix at one time. Sure, you can get five. If you pay more. Sure, you can have "go anywhere, anytime, anyplace, with anything" content. But it will either be so easy to hack and copy that the lack of profit will keep profit-hungry companies from wanting to allow it... or, it will be so expensive that only teenagers or people with completely disposable incomes will pay to use it.

Posted by Michael Stone on November 10, 2005 at 03:52 PM PST #

Apple has demonstrated a willingness to release new products that immediately destroy demand for relatively new products. Look at the nano - how many people had just purchased minis? And Apple continues improving their software base as well. Recent iTunes releases have dramatically improved functionality. So I expect to see further improvements in the near term. Today, podcasts are a bit frustrating - you have to download them from iTunes on your computer periodically. And there are hosts of other content that I would like to be able to get real-time. But Apple is beautifully positioned to leverage the music store as a portal in the future, to sell us the RIGHT to the music instead of the bits themselves - and keep the content stored centrally. Once the bandwidth is broad and ubiquitous enough to support that, we're good to go - just release an iPod with wireless connectivity. And now with video, too. So it's not a case of iPods killing themselves off - more a case of bootstrapping the infrastructure over time with the best that technology can provide for now. Carry this model to software - again, just bits, right? - and you can provide software as a service, with low support/subscription fees over a large population, instead of high purchase fees for the bits themselves. With one copy of the code, instead of a copy on each machine, so it's MUCH easier to maintain, both at the server and client end. After all, when an iPod downloads content from a server and plays it locally, it's just a specialized thin client, right? My big concern remains protection of my confidential material. Yes, I want it available wherever I am. But I'm not sure I trust a third party to store information about my stocks, my mortgage, my health records - especially without my own local copy in case of disaster. But the ability to use a thin client effectively is dramatically reduced if I don't have access to my data. I think that personal encryption will become much more ubiquitous to make this work, ultimately. We've seen companies like Canon, that enthusiastically set out to leapfrog their own inventions before others can do it. I'm sure Apple will do so, too. The iPod is dead - long live the iPod! One other note: I manage 3 iPods for my family. It's nontrivial to update our library with new material, select the right content for the right iPods, update iTunes periodically, etc. I'm a geek, and it's still a pain. And I would be happier with a device that didn't require this level of time and frustration. But I'm willing to invest the effort, because I enjoy the features of the iPod. Give it to me with less effort, and I will be happier.

Posted by Scott Schroeder on November 17, 2005 at 06:04 PM PST #

I think Paul Li may be right about the government assisting the broadband industry, but I think really it would be better in the form of tax breaks and incentives, instead of direct spending.

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