|
The Video iPod
November 30, 2005
How will the new video iPod change video content in cyberspace? What does it suggest or promise as a cultural model? How will it affect independent media makers and corporate media providers? Is the video iPod good or bad for cinema—or is the term "cinema" no longer applicable in such a context?
The first ten responses appear below in the order received:
Lev Manovich
Daniel Myrick
Mark Cuban
Tara Veneruso
Michael Edo Keane
Nicholas Rombes
Matthew Clayfield
Chuck Tryon
Evan Mather
David Lowery
Lev Manovich
Fall 2005 will be remembered as a milestone in the history of media. The introduction of the video iPod; standardization of video podcasting and use of video in blogs; PlayStation Portable 3 with its multiple communication capabilities and HDTV output. We are about to witness yet another stage of the digital sublime: a dramatic increase in the quantity of information—in this case digital video—which will be captured, stored, downloaded, uploaded, etc.
The dramatic increase in quantity of information greatly speeded up by the Internet has been accompanied by another fundamental development. Imagine water running down a mountain. If the quantity of water keeps continually increasing, it will find numerous new paths, and these paths will keep getting wider. Something similar is happening as the amount of information keeps growing—except these paths are also all connected to each other, and they go in all directions: up, down, sideways. Here are some of these new paths which facilitate movement of information between people, listed in no particular order: SMS, forward and redirect function in E-mail clients, mailing lists, Web links, RSS, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, publishing (as in publishing one's playlist on a Web site), peer-to-peer networks, Web services, Bluetooth, FireWire (and of course, all new video communication technologies listed above). These paths stimulate people to draw information from all kinds of sources into their own space, remix and make it available to others, as well as collaborate or at least play on a common information platform (Wikipedia, Flickr).
Barb Dybwad introduces a nice term, "collaborative remixability," to talk about this process: "I think the most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are new tools that explore the continuum between the personal and the social, and tools that are endowed with a certain flexibility and modularity which enables collaborative remixability—a transformative process in which the information and media we've organized and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services." [1]
If a traditional twentieth-century model of cultural communication described movement of information in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the reception point is just a temporary station on information's path. If we compare information or a media object with a shipping container, then each receiver can be compared to an intermediary shipping station. Information arrives, gets remixed with other information, and then the new package travels to another destination where the process is repeated.
We can find precedents for this "remixability" in modern electronic music where remix has been the key method since the 1980s. More generally, most human cultures developed by borrowing and reworking forms and styles from other cultures; the resulting "remixes" were to be incorporated into other cultures. Ancient Rome remixed Ancient Greece; medieval Japan remixed medieval China; Renaissance remixed antiquity; nineteenth-century European architecture remixed many historical periods including the Renaissance; and today graphic and fashion designers remix together just about all visually distinct historical and local cultural forms, from Japanese manga to traditional Indian clothing. At first glance it may seem that this traditional cultural remixability is quite different from "vernacular" remixability made possible by the computer-based techniques described above. Clearly, a professional designer working on a poster or a professional musician working on a new mix is different from somebody who is writing a blog entry or publishing her bookmarks.
But this is a wrong view. The two kinds of remixability are part of the same continuum. The designer and musician in the example above are equally affected by the same computer technologies. Design software and music composition software make the technical operation of remixing very easy; the Internet greatly increases the ease of locating and reusing material from other periods, artists, designers, etc. Even more importantly, since every company and freelance professionals in all cultural fields, from motion graphics to architecture to fine art, publish documentation of their projects on their Web sites, everybody can keep up with what everybody else is doing. Therefore, although the speed with which a new original architectural solution starts showing up in projects of other architects and architectural students is much slower than the speed with which an interesting blog entry gets referenced in other blogs, the difference is quantitative than qualitative. Similarly, when H&M or Gap can "reverse engineer" the latest fashion collection by a high-end design label in only a few weeks, this is part of the same new logic of speeded-up cultural remixability enabled by computers.
Since the introduction of first Kodak camera, "users" had tools to create massive amounts of vernacular media. Later they were given amateur film cameras, tape recorders, video recorders...But the fact that people had access to the same "tools of media production" as the professional media creators did not seem to play a big role in media culture until recently: the amateur and professional media pools did not mix. Professional photographs traveled between the photographer¹s darkroom and the newspaper editor; private pictures of a wedding traveled between members of the family. But the emergence of multiple and interlinked paths which encourage media objects to easily travel between Web sites, recording and display devices, hard drives, and people changes things. Remixability becomes practically a built-in feature of a digital networked media universe. In a nutshell, what may be more important than the introduction of a video iPod, a consumer HD camera, Flickr, or yet another new device or service is how easy it is for media objects to travel between all these devices and services which now all become only temporary stations in media's Brownian motion.
1. Barb Dybwad, "Approaching a definition of Web 2.0." The Social Software Weblog, September 29, 2005.
Daniel Myrick
I'm not sure how much the video iPod will change content itself in cyberspace, as much as it will change how we watch it. At the moment, the iPod is the "convergence shortcut" we've been looking for to get online content easily playable on the living room television, as well as "portablizing" this content to play when and where we desire—a mini-Tivo, if you will.
What the iPod exemplifies is that consumers like options. The option to watch programming based on their needs and schedule versus the network's and the option to catch programming that you otherwise would not get access to outside broadcast means are the primary examples. We're a culture of convenience.
The video iPod levels the playing field. No longer is the means of delivery the exclusive domain of a few players. Content such as The Strand is one click away from NBC.com. Underserved niche markets will now have access to this content, whereas before there simply was no alternative. Although studios and networks will have the advantage of the quantity of content, being that they'll monetize their existing libraries, the realm of original programming from this point forward will be an uphill climb for them, being that their production methodology is simply outdated and extremely expensive as compared to leaner and highly creative startups.
Is the video iPod good or bad for cinema? Apples to oranges. (No pun intended.) What is hurting cinema now is not the vast array of emerging options now appearing on the scene for content delivery, it's the quality of the programming coupled with higher prices that are undermining theatrical attendance. When you pay ten bucks a head to see the third or fourth installment of a film franchise that has been slapped together with a host of commercials in place of previews, you start to think that you're just watching a gigantic television series.
Whether it be books, radio, television, DVDs, theaters, live plays, and now "mini-media," they all coexist because they are different experiences for the audience. I think any time you make more creative content more accessible to more people, it's a good thing regardless of its delivery platform.
"How Bob Iger Saved Network Television"
Mark Cuban
Content has been available for download for years and years. That content could be played on any number of devices, from computers to DVD players to PDAs. Being able to play back a video from the new video iPod just like you can play a song from a current iPod certainly is not a technical marvel.
It is a business marvel. Bob Iger has gone contrary to what every current and previous television network head has and would have done had Bob not turned the industry on its head... Bob Iger has saved network television.
How?
By completely changing the economic model.
When a show is produced for primetime network television, it's traditionally sold to a network at a given license fee. More often than not, particularly for non-reality shows, that license fee is less than what it costs to produce the show.
The hope of the production company is that if they can produce good ratings for the network, not only can they increase the license fee after the first deal ends, but they can also sell the episodes in the future as part of a syndication deal and maybe even make some money back with DVD sales.
So, for instance, shows like Law and Order, CSI, and all their different versions can fetch more than one million dollars per episode. Most other shows fall in mid-six-figure price ranges and can go as low as $50-75,000 for hit reality shows like Survivor. The reality shows go for far less because everyone knows the winner already.
But what if CBS sold Survivor episodes the day after they aired like ABC is with Lost? What if they sold them not just on the iTunes Store, but through CinemaNow, MovieLink, Netflix, Walmart Online, wherever.
Think some people would buy them to keep up with the action? Possibly to sample the show? Think they might sell more than 75,000 downloads at $1.99 each?
Could this move have created a new market that could be comparable in size for some shows and more money for others than the current syndication market?
Absolutely. No question about it.
This is far far better than syndication because it can apply to all shows. For a bunch of reasons, most shows do not make it into syndication. Those that don't typically just sit on the shelf collecting dust. Most don't get DVD releases. They just rot.
And this is far easier and safer than releasing a DVD. No extras. No inventory. No shipping. No returns. No shelfspace issues. You ship a file to Apple and boom, the sales begin. What's more, Apple was incredibly smart to set the price tag at $1.99. That means few if any movies. Just television and video. You have all the shelf space to yourself for at least a little while. And if the demand appears, you know which titles to invest in for a DVD release.
Even the worst primetime television shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox get millions of viewers. If the network can convert a couple percentage points of viewers into downloaders, it can turn into decent money. Two bucks a pop. Fifty thousand downloads per EPS. That's more money than a hit reality show like Survivor earns in syndication.
And for some shows, the conversion rate could be much, much higher. A show like Lost could have hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode. Thats real money.
Which leads to how Bob Iger saved network television.
The entire television industry is scared shitless about how advertising will evolve. Will the 30-second commercial survive? Will personal video recorders eliminate commercial-watching in a material percentage of homes? What impact will HDTV have on television viewing and advertising (besides the obvious rush to HDNet & HDNet Movies)? The answers to these questions are pivotal to the programming side of the equation because without enough advertising revenue for the networks, how are they going to pay for programming?
Bob Iger has enabled a new revenue stream which, if it grows, could definitely be the revenue stream that saves primetime network television.
It's not inconceivable that just as DVDs have surpassed box office in revenues and the theatrical release has become a commercial for the DVD sale, the network television broadcast could become the commercial for the download sale. I don't see download sales surpassing advertising revenue, but I do see it as likely that the download sales could more than compensate for any advertising market weakness brought on by ratings erosion and/or changes in how ads are delivered on television. I also think it won't be long before we see an ad or two in front of the show that will further increase revenue.
How big a revenue stream could the two combined be? Big enough to matter...
All of this isn't going to happen overnight.
Distribution must expand beyond Apple, and it will. It will be interesting to see how fast Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Sony (If Sony had an iTunes and an ABC deal for the PlayStation Portable...wow!), AOL, and even retailers like Walmart Online and Best Buy respond. Which they will. They aren't going to let Apple run away with this market like they did music. I'm not saying they can stop them, but I think they learned a lot from what Apple has done with the iPod. The competition, in turn, should help the economics for the networks.
And this isn't about watching video on video iPod screens. It's about downloading video to iTunes software and its competitors, and all the places it does and will reside. All will be playback devices. I expect that either a second tier of pricing will come along from Apple for full-screen quality that is designed to play on a television rather than an iPod or half-screen on a laptop or PC, as competitors compete by enabling higher quality and full-screen playback. All of which will further expand the market...
Tara Veneruso
From a filmmaker's perspective, one of the exciting advances in digital filmmaking is the phenomenon of heading straight back to the actual birth of cinema with the nickelodeon. The content that we are now able to create and release for a wider audience is for an intimate, small screen. I will continue to create feature films for a theatrical release, but with Pocket Cinema, I can get out my other directing projects (music videos, shorts) in a more immediate fashion. The format shapes the story, and when the budget is low due to a shorter project, I am not having to wait for Mr. Money Bags to make a movie in order to reach the widest possible audience anymore. I would not make a feature length story/film for Pocket Cinema and vice versa. Other considerations are that I have truly embraced Pocket Cinema as a potential marketing tool for my longer projects. I look forward to the theatrical trailers of mine and my colleagues spreading across continental lines. In a way, we have the ability now to create alternative distribution in a more successful way. Also, due to the current technical limitations of Pocket Cinema, we are living in the days of a technologically imposed dogma. This is a wonderful creative side effect.
I am personally exuberant about the possibilities of this intimate cinema. It will allow me, as a content creator, to keep costs low while entertaining, theorizing, or being experimental in my directing style. This was an enormous help for me in my career with the advent of Internet e-filmmaking in 1994. I was able to work with actors and showcase our work online with near immediate results. In the 1990s, it shaped many new directors' careers, and I see that happening again.
I am equally ready to tackle this new arena of niche marketing by utilizing video podcasting to spread the word about any new work that I create. My former colleague, Jay Ashcraft of InterneTV, sadly no longer with us, prophesied our technological future. Jay was interviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997 stating, "There will have been a convergence of all technologies into one common thing...where computers will turn into the television set, and the fax machine turns into the radio, and the turn-on-the-oven-when-you're-at-work gadget..." He always talked about watching my music videos and short films on his phone while sitting on the bus. That does not depress me. In fact, I think it is a great asset in spreading my content out into the world. I am a creator, and I will always have a job.
The issue I am most thrilled about, when it comes to Pocket Cinema, is the continuation of the democratization of media. Pocket Cinema allows filmmakers to make a project outside of a system and distribute it around the world without seeking permission or approval. Naturally, many of our initial ideas for Pocket Cinema will be altered as big business moves in, which is an important disclaimer. My hope is that it will allow for more compelling content, that it will revitalize the music video industry, that it will allow for fresh, new voices and stories that need to be heard. Pocket Cinema is not new, but we are finally in the exciting position of it being financially and technically viable to charge viewers for content or to use it as marketing for more traditional media. I challenge all filmmakers to create content for Pocket Cinema. In many ways, it is like taking a smaller canvas for your painting and exploring the new adventure.
As a possible marketing scenario utilizing podcasting, I would like to work with others to create a podcast channel of women-directed feature trailers from different film distributors to complement the work I currently do with a site I founded called Movies Directed by Women. Our goal is to raise awareness and box office numbers of women-directed movies. Perhaps our funding could come from the film distributors themselves. A video podcast dedicated to this effort could make an ideal marketing strategy.
"The 'We' in the New iPod"
Michael Edo Keane on behalf of Rob Nilsson's Citizens Cinema
When first announced, we must admit to a little cynicism regarding the video podcast initiative put forth by Mr. Jobs. "Great, the corporate juggernauts of Disney and ABC get to squeeze a little more revenue out of their lowest common denominator offerings, and now we get to pay for music videos we have been seeing for free as Internet promos." But after speaking with some fellow travelers in our community, there was another consensus to consider: new opportunities for audience building.
Just as the audio podcast has shaken up the world of audio broadcasting, video podcasting will do the same for its broadcasting namesake. The big differences are that we are going from broad to narrow, from push to pull. The user will subscribe to the specific content of their choice, having it download automatically to their RSS reader, no longer relegated to the schedules, opinions, and agendas of the multinational feed. Are you into the fabrication of metal scrap into go-karts? There will be a podcast for it. Perhaps you are fascinated by the influence of Tuvan throat singing on the American avant-garde? There will be a podcast for it, or better yet, you will create it.
The last fifty years has seen a shrinking of the assets needed to produce media. What once necessitated massive machines, crews, and studios can now be accomplished with a palm-sized camcorder, a laptop, microphone, and iPod. Some will decry what they perceive to be a lack of excellence or connoisseurship in the creation of new media. We believe that there will be new standards set, that this "flattening" of the media landscape will allow for voices and visions to emerge that were until now obscured.
To clarify, it is not the iPod that is responsible for this radical transformation. It is the maturing of XML, RSS, broadband technology, and video compression that is enabling this revolution. Apple is providing the marketing muscle to spread the word of these capabilities in order to sell their latest portable media device, and we say go for it. Because for every user who configures their iTunes to download Desperate Housewives or the latest Madonna video, it is also paving the way to receive the messages of the independents. The promise of the Internet is now truly arriving for content creators, not in the form of inflated stocks meant to deceive the public through insider trading, but in the ability to be seen and heard by the global community.
As you can probably tell by now, we at Citizens Cinema are enthusiastic about these developments and the possibilities they hold. (Citizens Cinema is Rob Nilsson's new cinema lab and production company, which will be hosting workshops and creating Direct Action dramatic feature films integrating the developing skills of everyday "citizens" and the know-how of media professionals.)
Nicholas Rombes
One is tempted to dismiss the video-enabled iPod as yet another token of our narcissistic age: a device for those who want to be entertained at least by the medium if not the content. For surely, it is the medium that thrills today, when narrative has lost its charm.
If yesterday the spectator was trapped—a happy prisoner—in the dark in the theater beneath the magnificent screen, then today it is all reversed: it is the screen which is trapped by us. Rather than larger-than-life characters—literally!—we have smaller-than-life ones, reduced to the size of Happy Meal figures.
At its heart, this is a sort of de-humanization, a theoretical deconstruction taking a practical form. It is no coincidence that the shift from analog to digital coincided with the gradual reduction of the screen back to a mere 2.5 inches. The coldness of the digital code—the abandonment of the messy warmth of vinyl albums or the fuzzy glow of analog film for the binary logic of zeros and ones—is part of a larger and more ominous suspicion of accidents, or mistakes, or errors that constitute the human stance. The reduction of human faces to screens measured in inches—as opposed to feet—is a strange form of time reversal anti-humanism, or, more kindly, post-humanism. Isn't this what the postmodern theorists wished for all along? The fragmentation of human-ness into smaller and smaller bits, until it doesn't exist any more? And it is the duty of committed moving-image makers today to combat this medium-specific anti-humanism, to resurrect the debased human who has been toppled as just another myth, who has been confined to ever-smaller screens.
And yet, perhaps this is just so much nostalgia. For the video iPod, surely, is a new medium that awaits its content; or rather is already inventing its content. Just as in the early days of cinema filmmakers blatantly re-made other films or simply played the same footage over and over again to satisfy the tremendous demand for content—today's film and video makers have yet to formulate and standardize the proper subjects for our new small screens. This means that there will likely be a period of tremendous experimentation—as in the days of early cinema—as filmmakers explore fresh ways of storytelling suitable to new mediums.
In fact, it is in this very process of experimentation—with all its false starts, mistakes, beautiful accidents—that we reassert our human-ness in the face of the digital code. Today's portable small screens offer a sort of liberation from what the old theorists worried was the prison-like confines of the movie theater. In his 1975 essay "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema," Jean-Louis Baudry wrote that "taking into account the darkness of the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects which result from the projection of images, moving images, the cinematographic apparatus brings about a state of artificial regression."
Thirty years later, we have liberated ourselves from the screen by shrinking it and making it portable. Editing is no longer a function internal to the screen but rather a process we initiate by simply navigating the interfaces. Instead of the cinema of attractions, we have the cinema of distractions. The old traditions, like continuity editing, are now positively avant-garde. The small screen renders all content partial and ironic, as what lies beyond the frame, outside the screen, is a continual reminder that what you are watching is fake.
The hardest hit by the revolution are the academics, who are no longer sure of their function as demystifiers. It is 1968 all over again, except this time it is not that the students are rebelling against authority, but rather that they are rebelling for authority. They resent that they know more than their teachers. They desperately want to subject themselves to theory, but where do they find it? They have been raised on ironic media that theorizes itself; their professors tell them what they already know. Meanwhile, the professors wonder: should they be teaching students to see through media at the same time they teach them how to make media? The new media professors—with their PowerBook G4s and their video iPods—help legitimate the consumer logic that they pretend to resist. It is the students, after all, who are instructing their professors.
The devil's bargain that postmodern theory made with popular culture in the 1960s—the concession that mass cultural forms like movies and television and comics deserved serious, intellectual attention—means that we must spend more and more time simply mapping and describing the rapidly evolving media landscape. Media theory today is descriptive, not proscriptive. Traces of fierce critique, of hostility towards the media objects themselves, disappear in the rush to simply remain conversant with rapidly evolving technologies. Today, even intellectuals despise intellectuals.
One is tempted to say—but one must dare not say—that the ideas of the old theorists were sweeping, their prose unpredictable and wakeful because the screens they wrote about were overpowering and called for a defiant response. If today's theory is small—and in some cases complicit with the very logic of the dominant culture—then isn't this due to the proliferation of small screens that have lost their allure, that have lost their magic ability to provoke?
All this to ask: today, have we finally succeeded in making screens small enough for our small ideas?
"The Audiovisual in Transit"
Matthew Clayfield
The video iPod will not be the harbinger of a revolutionary new rich media language, but rather an appropriator, modulator, and transformer of old forms. Its interest lies in its capacity for qualitatively changing the way we experience established types of audiovisual material—by which I mean the fixed, holistic, and autonomous bodies of film, video, and television—not in its capacity for generating or accommodating new ones—by which I mean the malleable, fragmented, and interpenetrative bodies of post-cinema, softvideo, and the network.
The fact of the matter is that the video iPod is a hardcopy device, and, as such, is only capable of handling network-ignorant material of fixed duration, composition, découpage, and so on. Sure, content providers will undoubtedly work to create material that's aesthetically conducive to the device—I expect to see a proliferation of close-ups, shorter running times, high quality audio, and perhaps even an appropriation of abstract avant-garde aesthetics in the vein of Harry Smith or Jeremy Blake—but the defining structural characteristic of this content—its hardcopy holism—will remain fundamentally unchanged.
Which is not to say that the device is without interest in and of itself. It's not. It might not mark, as so many have mistakenly claimed, a revolutionary step forward in the history new media (or even in the history of something like videoblogging), but it's nonetheless extremely interesting, at least insofar as traditional media and its forms are concerned, as a re-contextualiser par excellence. With video iPods being shipped out with preloaded mainstream content on them, episodes of Lost being downloadable from iTunes, and the inevitability, already being explored, of feature length movies eventually finding their way to the device's 2.5-inch screen, it's the iPod's re-contextualising, transmogrifying power that we should be paying most attention to.
There are at least three ways in which the video iPod will affect such material:
1. By affecting form and its effects. What will the video iPod do to the form of a work that was originally intended to be seen projected on a big screen, shown on a television, or viewed on a computer? More importantly, what will the video iPod do to what that work does—or was intended to do—to us as viewers? What does a 2.5-inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio do to a film shot on 35mm film at a ratio of 1.85:1? How does technology qualitatively affect form and its effects?
This is a question—of evolution, of migration—that poses itself whenever content from one medium finds its way to another. It's perhaps the central question in our messy age of disembodied audiovisual substances. The following questions, in contrast, are much more iPod-specific.
2. By forcing people to experience a work in isolation. The miniaturisation of the screen is an attempt to control it on an individual level, but also leads, I would argue, to an increasingly alienated populace. The communitarian screen—that of the movie theatre of the 1930s and 1940s—has given way to smaller, more individual ones—those of the television, of the computer—and down and down we go. And here we are.
How do our relations with a work change when we're forced to watch it in isolation from other human beings? And not merely in isolation but in a strange sort of public isolation, on trains and buses, in cafés and restaurants? Does one exhibit the presumably embarrassing emotions that are usually reserved for the darkness of the theatre or the privacy of one's own home when watching something emotionally affective in public? Does one laugh or cry? How does our relationship with a work change when we're consciously aware that, though we may be in public, this is not a communal experience?
3. By putting the audiovisual in transit. The video iPod, by virtue of its portability, not only allows us to access content when and wherever we want, but also to do so while in motion—in transit—in a car, on a train, on foot, and so on. The effect is a bizarre kind of montage from without. Indeed, if the aesthetic effect of the original iPod was that our music became the soundtrack to our lives, then the aesthetic effect of the video iPod will be that our lives become the aleatoric and peripheral reverse shot of the images on the screen.
How do variables in the environment surrounding a work—the manifold fluctuations of real life, the speed at which we and our screens move through the world, the smoothness or jerkiness of our movements—affect, again, our relationship with that work? How would my relationship with an episode of Rocketboom change if I were to watch it while skydiving?
These are the questions that interest me most about the video iPod, forcing us, as they do, to think about how forms do what they do, in what context, and about how they create—or simply get imbued with—meaning. As far as I'm concerned, the video iPod has almost nothing to do with the development of new media forms, and almost everything to do with the continued disembodiment, relocation, and reinterpretation of the established hardcopy ones of film, video, and television.
And that's more than enough for me right now. I didn't expect a revolution. I'm quite happy to take the video iPod as the transmogrifier it is.
"Video Mobility"
Chuck Tryon
The cinema has always been linked with concepts of temporal and spatial mobility. From the earliest films featuring trains entering stations or moving at previously unprecedented speeds to D.W. Griffith's fantasy of a futuristic library in which films could transport spectators into the historical past, cinema perpetually offers spectators the sometimes pleasurable and sometimes disorienting fantasy of mobility, even if only for the two-hour duration of a standard feature film. [1] This desire for mobility has only intensified with the development of television, which Raymond Williams came to associate with the concept of "mobile privatization," [2] and with the "time-shifting" capabilities of the VCR, which gave consumers the ability to record programs and play them back on their own time. [3] It is within this ongoing association between cinema and mobility that I wish to place the recent launch of the video iPod. The new video iPod marks yet another stage in the gradual transformation of how moving images are produced, stored, distributed, and viewed. While it is difficult to predict the many divergent uses that truly independent and avant-garde media makers will find for this new technology, journalistic and popular accounts have portrayed the video iPod primarily as a tool for supporting an increased portability and mobility of the image. In this sense, it is important to question both the utopian and the dystopian strains that accompany the emergence of any new technology.
Perhaps the least surprising response has been to address the degree to which the video iPod might represent a threat to the more established media of television and cinema. New visual technologies are invariably seen as threatening to eliminate older ones. It is important to note that the video iPod emerges at precisely the moment when the Hollywood studio system is approaching crisis mode when it comes to film attendance, with Patrick Goldstein arguing that "the era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close." [4] In addition, some television networks worrying that the TiVoToGo service, which allows users to transfer recorded television shows to their iPods, will further damage their control over network television content. [5] Because this technology has generally been treated in the media and on the Apple Web site in terms of this capacity of "time-shifting," I am inclined to think about the new video iPod specifically as an extension of video rather than as an extension of cinema, although "media convergence" might be a better term for describing these changes.
In essence, these articles about iPod video reflect larger fears about the loss of control over images. This fear is clearly articulated in the jeremiads about the effect of video iPods on public-private boundaries. The most explicit articulation of these fears can be found in a November 20, 2005, column by George Will, in which the conservative commentator laments that because of cell phones and iPods, "many people have no notion of propriety when in the presence of other people, because they are not actually in the presence of other people." [6] Imagining a world of image-addicted zombies immersed in television shows and movies on their iPod, Will cites a recent observation by Lynn Truss that "this is an age of social autism." Will's nostalgia for a prior era of good manners aside, his identification between the new video iPod and an increasing blurred boundary between public and private suggests that the iPod's tiny 2.5-inch screen will breed a greater—and inappropriate—intimacy with the image. [7] Further, in a strange overlap between conservative and left nostalgia, Will's comments strangely echo Kalle Lasn's comments about the TV-B-Gone, [8] a remote control which can be used to turn off all televisions within a small radius, thus reclaiming public space, presumably in order to promote public conversation. Lasn, of course, is correct to note the degree to which human attention is consistently bought and sold in public space, and it's hard to deny that video iPods will reproduce that effect, at least to the degree that popular ABC shows, such as Lost and Desperate Housewives, can be purchased for $1.99 from the Apple Web site.
While I don't want to dismiss the deleterious effects of the commodification of public space and human attention, such worries underestimate the degree to which video iPods can be used to promote conversation and dialogue among users rather than eradicating them. In much the same way that bloggers and other online communities publish weekly "iPod shuffles" to promote their taste in music, it is easy to imagine that social networks will emerge on the basis of shared interests in videos downloaded on their iPods. It is also possible that the video iPod will function primarily as a means of distribution, rather than as a site of media consumption. While the portable 2.5-inch screen allows subway commuters or airline travelers to carry their favorite television episodes with them, a video iPod may also allow media makers to distribute their productions to a much wider audience. At the same time, as Nick Rombes notes, media makers will find new and unexpected uses for video iPods, uses that will find narratives that take advantage of the 2.5-inch screen. [9] In this regard, I believe that the video-enabled iPod will further intensify the identification between cinema, or video, and mobility, but that this mobility must be understood both in terms of the harmful potential for increasing privatization and in terms of the new possibilities for the rapid dissemination of new images.
1. The relationship between cinema and train travel has been widely documented. For one recent example of this connection, see Tom Gunning's "Vienna Avant-Garde and Early Cinema."
2. See, for example, Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatised Society," Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings.
3. On the time-shifting capacity of the VCR, see Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture and Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern.
4. On the decline of the studio system, see Patrick Goldstein, "Studio Heads Fiddle About as Hollywood Burns," and Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture.
5. Michael Learmonth, "Peeved over TiVo." Variety.com, November 21, 2005.
6. George Will, "iPod's Missed Manners." WashingtonPost.com, November 20, 2005.
7. This fear of image portability seems connected to worries about the quickly emerging "portable porn" market, as this Seattle Times article illustrates.
8. Julia Scott, "He Doesn't Like to Watch." Salon.com, April 25, 2005.
9. Nick Rombes, "The End of the Screen and its Beginning." Digital Poetics, November 22, 2005.
Evan Mather
Remember back in 1991 how we laughed at Apple's ad for the first Powerbook? It depicted a young woman waiting for a plane and apparently typing out her thesis. Who the hell writes their term paper in an airport? Fast forward to today and we can edit our feature films on the bus. Portability, portability, portability. Create your experience wherever you want.
I have been distributing my computer-edited short films via the Web for a long time. However, the postage-stamp size and viewing conditions have always concerned me. With advances in compression algorithms we do get bigger than the stamp—but how comfortable it is to watch even a short film on a computer monitor or laptop? Isn't it awkward? I like to watch my films on the couch in a fetal position—I can't sit formally in a chair in front of a computer and enjoy watching Web cinema. It feels so forced. That is one of the things that is so cool about the new video iPod: the extreme portability—forget about watching movies on the bus, now you can watch them while jogging on the beach.
Furthermore, the seamless integration of the QuickTime software and the operating system enables a content provider to easily convert his full-frame digital film into the video iPod format (H.264) in just a few clicks and drag and drop the file to go—and it looks beautiful on that 2.5-inch screen.
What I am most excited about, however, is the ability, the urge, to now convert my thirty-odd short films from the tiny postage-stamp size to the iPod format, post them on the Web, and distribute them so that viewers can watch them as they were intended—on the toilet.
"Some Conjecture on the Video iPod"
David Lowery
Most of the new theory forming around the video iPod and its effect on cinematic form has centered on the size of the screen. Within this very symposium, one will doubtlessly find inquiries such as: how is already existing content affected by such a diminished canvas? What new content will be created to take advantage of it? How will the latter affect the former? How will portability and connectivity affect both? Is this the dawn of a new and prevalent aesthetic model? [1]
All of these questions, fascinating and valid (and, indeed, exciting) as they may be, are also perhaps slightly exaggerated. They are posed with the assumption that the video iPod is a receptacle for content; that it is a ravenous infant attached to an IEE1394 umbilical cord, and that all media channels are redirecting themselves to this 2.5-inch screen. There's certainly some legitimacy there, but any talk of an evolution (or revolution) in content seems to neglect consideration of one of the least hyped but most important features of the video iPod—three words which, I think, subtly define what the device actually represents: composite video out.
This capability may well render the 2.5-inch video screen little more than an attractive feature on a device that can function independently but is most useful as a portable peripheral. I believe that before any revolution in content has the chance to take sway there will be a revolution in codec and a revolution of console. The first will allow HD content to be mirrored on both an iPod screen and a television screen at a resolution suitable for both (the iPod is currently limited to 320x240 HD content, which can be displayed on a television but certainly won't fill it). [2]
The second revolution is a broader topic.
The proliferation of tiny screens in handheld devices will not likely bring about a surcease of expansive televisions; indeed, HD monitors are decreasing in price as they increase in popularity. Digital displays are becoming increasingly cinematic; people still want movie theaters in their living rooms. High definition content is gaining prevalence in both broadcasting and on the Internet, and so too are televisions and computer monitors becoming more analogous in design and function, input and output.
It's long been predicted that the two will eventually merge, and their waning separative membrane was breached outright with the release of the new Apple G5 iMac (which occurred, not at all coincidentally, with the new iPod). The computer has composite video-out ports; like the iPod, it can be connected to and its content mirrored by a television screen. This feature is practically a few innovations away from redundancy, for this iMac, which is being marketed around its remote control and Front Row software (control your computer from your sofa! proclaims the advertising), seems explicitly designed to undermine the dominance of the television.
The video iPod, then, could be seen as a gateway device, an excuse for the development of iTunes as a media hub that will, within the next few years, become the core of home entertainment systems, through which digital media will flow freely. The iPod will be a portable, temporary media library, both feeding and feeding off of larger displays. You might use it to watch a film or television show on an airplane; but when you get home, you'll plug it into your television/monitor and that little screen will go dark.
The 2.5-inch screen will be exploited by innovators and expounded upon by theorists, and with good cause; but any effect it may have on the form of cinema and other established media will be marginal at best. It will be important as a facilitator of form and content, but will, in the grand sense, define neither.
1. Nick Rombes of Digital Poetics writes that the 2.5-inch display "is a retreat from the big screen, which is too overbearing, too melodramatic for us now. We live in a time poisoned by irony; we need our ironic mediums. It's hard to conceive of a Total Anything anymore; the small screen—a fragment, a reminder of our old sincere days—-is the perfect medium of expression."
2. Mike Curtis of HD For Indies recently predicted "that Apple will have 960x720 HD downloadable movies available from an iTunes-like store within the next couple of years." I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that future models of the video iPod will be able to handle files of that resolution.
|
|
|
