I spent the early part of this week trashing the idea of a video iPod (or "ViPod," because heaven forbid we not have a cutesy name for this shit) to anyone who would listen. I am an Apple partisan -- I love my iPod Photo and Titanium PowerBook (that is to say, my "TiBook") more than any of my other gadgets -- but something about this video iPod idea just struck me wrong. All the speculation felt like it was based on the assumption that this was where the iPod, as a device and as a brand, ought to go, but not based so much on whether or not there was any place for such a device.

What Apple announced on Wednesday is, for the most part, less terrible than what I was envisioning, but I still think it's a move that will not be successful without some major retooling.

Problem #1: Portable video is a market that doesn't really exist, and to the extent that it does, the video iPod doesn't serve it.

When the original iPod debuted in 2001, it was both revolutionary and distinctly descended from the original Walkman, first released 22 years prior. Portable music was extremely common and was a category of media technology that people understood well. Portable video, on the other hand, exists primarily in the form of portable DVD players right now -- these players, both handheld and car-installed, have 16:9 screens that measure about 5" across. The video iPod, by comparison, has a screen only slightly bigger than previous iPods, and plays video at a much lower resolution than DVD's -- 320 x 240 vs. 720 x 480. Furthermore, the video iPod cannot easily play your DVD's; Apple cannot distribute DVD ripping software the way they do for CD's. This tells me that the contexts in which people might watch video on their iPods will necessarily be different than those in which they watch portable DVD players -- in other words, Apple is trying to create a whole new kind of media usage.

Problem #2: The available content is not attractive compared to competing sources.

The iTunes video store is selling videos for $1.99; times 22 episodes per season, that's about the same price as a DVD set, even though they're much lower quality and you can't burn them to DVD on your own. The early adopters that Apple would like to rush out and buy a video iPod probably have higher quality sources already -- whether downloading via BitTorrent or recording with their own TiVos or PC's -- and will not have much interest in buying video downloads.

Again, this is a divergence from the model of the original iPod. In 2001, music downloading had become a pretty big deal. What Apple offered when they launched their music store was something relatively comparable to both downloaded or personally ripped MP3's and CD's -- most people would not be able to tell the difference in quality, nor would they care. However, most people will be able to tell the difference between a VHS-quality copy of a Lost episode and the HDTV or DVD version of the same show.

Along these same lines, Quicktime for Windows is a giant piece of crap, and the extent to which the video iPod relies on Quicktime to handle things on the host computer may determine how popular these things become.

Problem #3: The industry is not going to come running for this.

The things that Apple has failed to convince me are also the things they need to convince the TV and movie industries of, but more so. TV has such an intricate money situation that it didn't take six hours for ABC affiliates to start throwing around lawsuit threats over the video store. Viacom-owned Blockbuster Video seems nonplussed. Everyone knows that the DRM wrapped on these files will get cracked, which only feeds the industries' piracy fears. Presumably Apple's done some of the homework on this, but they clearly haven't done all of it.

Upshot: It's not a new device.

When I say the video iPod is not as terrible as I had imagined, it's because Apple chose to integrate the video stuff as a feature of the existing iPod line, rather than create a different device. I was expecting something with a form factor similar to that of a portable DVD player, which would've come with some problems of its own. By just making it a feature, they don't damage the iPod brand or prejudice anyone against the new technology -- if you don't care about video, you get an iPod and don't do anything with the video stuff.

Solution: Mac Mini media center.

At the same time as the video iPod announcement, Apple announced some new built-in software for the iMac to make it more functional as an all-around media device. Why the hell didn't they incorporate that -- plus some TiVo-like capabilities -- into the Mac Mini? Given that the downloadable videos can be watched on computers as well as iPods, given that the size of the iPod fairly demands that you watch videos via the iPod's video-out function, why not finally come out with the all-in-one, low-price media box that we've all been waiting for since the late 90's?

Ultimately, the usability of the iPod as a player itself is where the whole thing falls down, and a Mac Mini that easily plugs into your home theatre setup solves that problem, along with the problem of low resolution video. The iPod requires MPEG-4 at 320 x 240 because that format doesn't take much processing power. A Mac Mini, on the other hand, could play basically any format that Apple wanted to bundle with Quicktime, at high resolutions. Maybe that's what next, and I hope it is, because the video iPod route seems like a deadender.