Unless you’ve been in a coma, you must have heard the news: Yesterday Apple Computer announced a video-enabled iPod and video content for it available for purchase through the iTunes Music Store.
This is, well, huge, because (1) it’s Apple’s first small step into the video-on-demand business, and if they do this right, they’ll own it, and (2) forget podcasts; now vidcasters like Jenn Cutter can get their content into the hands of white earbud users everywhere.
So is this the death of TV or what?
It’ll take a while (the coming holiday shopping season, at least) for this new “wide-pod” to gain significant market share; perhaps in the meantime sometime can ‘splain to me how vidcasters are going to make any kind of money to sustain their ongoing efforts. It’s one thing to muck around with a microphone, but quite another to plan, shoot, edit and deliver video programming on a regular basis.
Advertising could support vidcasts, I suppose, but wouldn’t it be cool if Apple would let the little guy content producers charge for their wares just like the big boys do, and collect the cash for them through the iTunes Music Store?
That might really end up being the death of TV, in the best possible way…
